


happy is what happens when your dreams come true

by KiaraSayre



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Amnesia, Angst, Captain America: The Winter Soldier Compliant, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Flashbacks, Gen, Howling Commandos - Freeform, Howling Commandos Era, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Viciously Ironic Title
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-02
Updated: 2014-06-02
Packaged: 2018-02-03 05:15:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 38,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1732475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KiaraSayre/pseuds/KiaraSayre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve just wanted his best friend back.  He gets it, and it's not easier.</p><p> </p><p>  <i>"Oh, he's said something, all right," Hill says. "The same thing, over and over again."</i><br/><i>On the screen, Bucky lifts his head, jerking his chin up in defiance. Steve's seen him do it a thousand times before.</i><br/><i>"Name, rank, and serial number," he guesses quietly.</i><br/><i>"How'd you know?" Fury asks.</i><br/><i>"It's him," Steve says. "It's really him, not the Winter Soldier. It's Bucky."</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	happy is what happens when your dreams come true

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to [Desdemon](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Desdemon/pseuds/Desdemon) and [Chaya](http://archiveofourown.org/users/chaya/pseuds/chaya) for looking this over! Any mistakes are mine.
> 
> Detailed warnings at the end of the fic.

**10**

The call comes in at three in the morning, and Steve and Sam are on the road by three-fifteen. It's a five hour drive from Philadelphia to the Shenandoah Valley, and Steve insists on doing the driving - they're both tired, but Steve at least has the serum.

Maria Hill is waiting for them in front of the facility, which looks like the farmhouse of a fairly well-maintained apple orchard from the outside, about half an hour off the Interstate. The damp fog chills Steve's skin, filling the air with the dull pink-purple glow of sunrise through the neat lines of apple trees.

"You made good time," Hill says as Steve takes care not to slam the car door behind him - it'd be easy to, under the circumstances.

"Not a lot of traffic this time of day," Sam says. "If you can call it 'day.' I thought you took a job at Stark?"

"Where is he?" says Steve.

"Fury'll brief you," Hill says, "and I did, until Fury called."

"And you came running?" Sam says.

"For this?" Steve catches Hill's pointed glance. "Don't we all?"

Inside, the farmhouse looks more like an SSR bunker than a SHIELD facility, enough so that Steve bets it was repurposed. The walls and floors are cement, and there are exposed metal beams across the ceiling. 

Hill leads them through a series of corridors and down three flights of stairs before opening a door that leads to a briefing room. There's a display on the wall, showing an interrogation room with one occupant, and a few different files scattered across broad conference table.

"Glad you could make it, gentlemen," Fury says. "You'll be glad to know the Winter Soldier hasn't killed anyone."

Steve walks over to the display, watching the feed. Bucky's sitting at a table, a line of glints of light going from wrist to table betraying the presence of handcuffs. His right arm lays on the table; his left arm is tucked underneath it, as far as the handcuff will let it go. He's sitting quietly, but Steve can see the rise and fall of his shoulders as he breathes, too deep and even to be truly calm. Steve's seen him look worse; Steve has also seen him look much, much better.

"I want to talk to him," he says.

"That was generally the idea of calling you," Fury says. "Eventually."

"Has he said anything?" Sam asks from somewhere behind Steve.

"Oh, he's said something, all right," Hill says, with a faint grind of irritation. "The same thing, over and over again."

On the screen, Bucky lifts his head, jerking his chin up in defiance. Steve's seen him do it a thousand times before.

"Name, rank, and serial number," he guesses quietly.

"How'd you know?" Fury asks.

"It's him," Steve says. "It's really him, not the Winter Soldier. It's Bucky."

He turns around in time to see Fury and Hill trading looks. Sam is just watching him. Steve chooses to ignore the concern on his face.

"I've known him longer than any of you have been alive," Steve says. "I know it's him. That's not how the Winter Soldier moves, it's how _Bucky_ moves."

"Or," says Hill, "it's how the Winter Soldier moves when he wants to pretend to be Barnes long enough to throw us off our game. Make us vulnerable."

"We found him by accident," Fury says, and walks to the conference table. He takes a seat, and Hill and Sam follow suit. Steve can't make himself sit, the certainty fizzing underneath his skin, so he leans against the back of one of the chairs. 

"This facility was supposed to be SHIELD, but some digging in light of recent events suggests that most, if not all, of the personnel were HYDRA," Fury continues. "There was a high turnover rate for this assignment, so we're still trying to figure out who was or wasn't, but another op gave us some intel that this base might have materials of strategic importance to HYDRA. We thought we'd check it out. We storm the facility and lo and behold, there's the Winter Soldier, still in the chair where HYDRA left him."

"The security footage wasn't encrypted," says Hill, and points a remote control at the display. The scene switches to an overhead view of a large, empty room - a basement, maybe. One side of the screen is bounded by a bank of computer displays; the only other furniture in the room is a large black chair, like a malevolent dentist's. A figure comes into view, blurred and unfamiliar, looking over its shoulder. Another figure follows, watching the first cross to the computer equipment - Bucky, Steve realizes, watching the way he holds himself and seeing the tiniest reflection off his left arm. The first figure turns back from the computers and gestures to the chair, a quick, jerky motion, and Bucky hesitates for a moment before getting into it. The rest of the apparatus folds down onto his head. There is no sound on the video, but Bucky's jerking and twitching is obvious even in the low resolution of the security footage. Steve watches the pattern of rises and falls of Bucky's chest: fast inhales, long and sustained exhales. He's screaming.

The first figure doesn't even turn towards the chair as they run out of the room.

"Did you get the other guy?" Steve says, his voice hollow.

"That was about two hours before we got here," says Hill, pausing the video. "The procedure seems to have lasted for about half an hour, but the technician left almost immediately, as you can see. The Winter Soldier was unconscious until we got here, and while we moved him to one of the isolation rooms. We're still working on crosschecking the data that Widow put on the internet to figure out who the technician could be – if HYDRA was being _really_ sneaky, they might not have been on SHIELD's payroll at all."

"The two of you stormed this bunker yourselves?" Sam asks, looking from Hill to Fury.

"No," says Fury. "Our backup just has other things to do right now."

"Compartmentalizing again, Nick?" Steve says.

"Trying not to die," Fury replies. "They're checking the rest of the compound to make sure HYDRA didn't leave any unpleasant surprises for us."

"I want to see him," Steve says again.

"I'm not so sure that's a good idea just yet," says Fury. "There's no way of knowing what HYDRA did to him in that chair - "

"Did you, I don't know, maybe check the computers?" Sam says.

Hill snaps her fingers, shaking her head ruefully. "Darn! If only we'd thought to check the computers. Too bad we're complete morons."

"We've never seen anything like this kind of tech," Fury says. "We have no way of knowing what we're looking at, and the list of people I trust to come out here and see my face isn't exactly long."

"We also can't rule out some kind of sleeper programming," Hill says. "For all we know, anything could trigger him and make Barnes go away for good. And for that matter, his last mission was to kill you, Steve. Do you really want to go in there and find out that it still is?"

"He saved my life," Steve says. "He pulled me out of the Potomac, I know he did - "

"He put you _in_ the Potomac, in case you forgot," Fury says. "And he also tried to kill me, which I'm trying hard not to be offended by. I happen to be pretty attached to living."

"Then maybe you shouldn't have faked your death," Steve says.

He hears Sam let out a quiet but satisfied "ouch" at that, and ignores it.

"If he's using his Army rank and serial number, then he either thinks it's still 1945 or he's pretending to," Steve continues. "You want to see what he really thinks? Let me in there."

Fury looks at Steve for a long moment. "How about we split the difference for now," he says. "Hill takes another shot at getting him to talk, and you watch him, see what you can see. And if that doesn't work, you can talk to him yourself."

"Sir, with all due respect, if you wanted an interrogator you should've called Romanoff," Hill says.

"Well, she's halfway around the world on some damn Eat, Pray, Love journey of self-discovery and you're right here," Fury says. "I work with what I've got, Hill."

Hill glances at Steve, as long-suffering as the day is long, but says, dryly, "Yes, sir. Of course, sir. I'd be honored to, sir." She grabs one of the files off the table and rolls her eyes so hard that her head moves with the motion as she leaves.

As the door to the briefing room closes behind her, Sam says, "I thought Romanoff was building herself some new covers, not…" After a moment's hesitation, he finishes, "hot Italian men."

"Same difference," says Fury dismissively.

Sam nods slowly. "She said she wasn't coming, didn't she?"

Even past the sunglasses, Steve can tell that Fury's glaring.

The door on the screen opens, and Hill enters, carrying a file under one arm. Steve watches Bucky watch her, his eyes tracking her across the room to the chair where she sits. Steve recognizes that look - the sharp-edged belligerence, spoiling for a fight.

"Let's try this again," Hill says. "Do you know where you are?"

Bucky's silent for a moment, and Steve's heart almost stops. Then he tilts his head with that familiar cockiness and says, "James Buchanan Barnes. Sergeant. 32557."

Hill opens the folder and makes a note on the page there. "Do you know what year it is?"

"James Buchanan Barnes. Sergeant. 32557."

"Uh-huh," says Hill. "What's the last thing you remember before we took you into custody?"

"James Buchanan Barnes. Sergeant. 32557."

Hill rests her chin on her hand, the one still holding the pen. "Are you physically capable of saying anything other than that?"

Bucky gives her a grin too tight and closed-lipped to be shit-eating, and says, "James Buchanan Barnes. Sergeant. 32557."

"Mmm-hmm," Hill says. "What's your name?"

Bucky does show some teeth in this smile, even though he directs it at the ceiling. He plays along anyway. "James Buchanan Barnes."

"And your rank?"

"Sergeant."

"Serial number?"

"32557."

"Well," says Hill, and flips the folder closed, "it's nice to get a straight answer for once."

Bucky's grin has soured, but he tilts his head like he's tipping a hat to her. He doesn't say anything else.

"Well?" Fury says, as Hill gets up and tucks the folder under her arm, heading for the door.

"He thinks you're HYDRA," Steve says immediately. "That's why he won't say anything. He's been interrogated by HYDRA before and he didn't break - he's not going to break for you, no matter how many times you tell him you're the good guys."

"You did tell him you're the good guys, right?" Sam says.

"We haven't told him anything, and we're not going to until we know that saying 'SHIELD' isn't a trigger."

"Nothing at all?" Steve says, turning towards Fury. "Not even that it's been seventy years - "

Fury leans back in his chair and crosses his arms. "Not a thing, and we're not going to, either. I know you think that's your friend in there, and I'm willing to concede that Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes might be in that head of his. But until I know otherwise, I'm going to assume that's not the _only_ thing in there."

There's a soft popping noise, and when Steve looks down, he sees that his fingers have ripped the fake-leather upholstery of the chair he's leaning on. He stands up straighter, taking his hands off the chair and letting them ball into fists at his sides.

"No wonder he thinks you're HYDRA. He woke up in a strange facility and immediately got interrogated. If anything, the fact that he isn't trying to gain our trust is almost a sign that he isn't - "

"Captain, look me in the eye and tell me that there is anything that man could do that you wouldn't take as a sign that he's who you want him to be," Fury says.

"Well, if he shot me again, it would be an indication."

Hill comes back into the briefing room and lets the file fall onto the table with a slap. "That's basically how the last two went, too," she says with a sigh, and looks at Steve. "Well?"

Steve glances back at the display. Bucky is sitting alone at the table, his shoulders squared back and set down in determination. 

"It's Bucky," he says. "You can't just keep him here forever."

"SHIELD deals with crazy shit all the time - is there really no protocol for dealing with potentially compromised agents?" Sam asks.

"There's no SHIELD anymore," Hill snaps, and then sighs and says, "Sorry. You're just not the first person I've had to remind. I've had to remind just about everyone, actually."

"There is a protocol, and this is it," Fury says. "Step one - isolation. Step two - controlled exposure to potential triggers under carefully-managed circumstances in increasing order of likelihood. Step three is ideally mental examination by a telepath, but that's never actually happened."

"I," says Sam. "You. What?"

"Telepaths were kind of the white whale of SHIELD," Maria says. "Everyone wants to find one, nobody actually can. Also, the protocol's never actually been successfully enacted from start to finish." She gives Steve a pointed look. "I'm sure you remember breaking Agent Barton out of isolation."

"Don't give him ideas, Hill," Fury says.

"Controlled exposure to potential triggers," Steve repeats. "Does that mean - actually telling him?"

Hill and Fury trade looks.

"I guess we're on step two, then," Fury says. "Let's see how Sergeant Barnes takes to the future."

**viii**

War is war is war. Bucky sees a lot of guys die, from the supposedly glorious battlefield bullets through the heart to the just plain stupid and senseless overturned ambulances and cuts gone bad. He watches more than one chest rise and fall and rise and fall and not rise again. He sticks his hands against wounds fountaining blood in the hopes that it'll do a damn thing, and it doesn't. He learns a hundred, a thousand different ways to die, from slow fading to suddenly becoming absent, going from walking and talking and looking around to an empty sack of meat in a uniform before the blood's even hit the ground.

If he doesn't sleep, well, none of them really do. There's a war on, so having a twitch is practically healthy, because that glint in the corner of your eye might be your buddy's wedding ring in the sun as he sips from his canteen or it could be a sniper scope.

They hear a lot of news through their Colonel, who says one day, heavy-faced and solemn, that the counts of the living and dead coming out of battles on this front haven't been adding up to the number of soldiers going in. The Germans are taking captives. Nobody knows why.

There are whispers through the countryside, at least from the villagers who'll talk to them - quiet murmurs about snakes and heads and what happens to the people who defy HYDRA. 

"It's from Greek mythology," Gabe Jones says one night, when they're packed close to a fire trying to get the feeling back in their feet. Not a one of them has a shoe without at least one hole. Bucky misses sidewalks more than he misses his own mother. "It's a snake with all these heads, and if you cut one off, two more grow back in its place."

"Jesus, Jones," Ingrams says, "is there _anything_ you don't know?"

"It's called an education, boys," Jones says, and Fredericks groans and throws a wadded-up sock at him.

Sometimes they talk about their sweethearts. Bucky's the only one who doesn't have one.

"Why have one sweetheart when you could have all of 'em?" Bucky says with a shrug.

MacFarlane shakes his head. "That's just heartless, Sarge. How can you deprive some little ol' lady back in Brooklyn of your tales of valor and courage? Just think, somewhere out there, there's a dame who could be telling all her friends right now about all the Nazis you've killed and can't because you were so selfish."

"Hell, I got three little ol' ladies," Bucky says. "Rebecca, Myrtle, and Agnes. Three younger sisters, gents. Can't say I'm complaining about escaping their tender feminine touch for a while."

Ingrams rolls his eyes, and Bucky's tempted to add that Myrtle has the meanest right hook he's ever had the misfortune to face, Becca spends more time in the library than at home and half of what she reads looks like Greek, and there's not a boy or girl in the neighborhood where they grew up that didn't get Agnes's teeth in their arm if they crossed her.

There are posters, too, whenever a camp lasts for more than a week or so. They're there to try to keep everyone's spirits up, like the music on the radio and the cigarettes that come with their meals, but Bucky does a double-take the first time he sees one in a watering hole in Italy.

"Steve!" he shouts. "That's friggin' Steve, you guys!"

Dum Dum looks over his shoulder at the poster, and says, loud enough for his voice to carry over MacFarlane's singing (because MacFarlane _never stops singing_ ), "Captain America's named Steve?"

"Nah," says Bucky (okay, yells, he's a little drunk and a lot excited), and puts his index finger right against the face. "Steve's my pal from back home, the artist. Hey, guess he got himself a good and steady job, huh?"

"You can recognize your friend's drawing?" Fredericks calls from back at the table, and Bucky laughs so hard he can almost taste the beer come back up.

"The punk used his own goddamn face!" Bucky shakes his head. "We enlisted together, y'know. Or tried. He got 4F'ed - asthma."

"Lucky bastard," Ingrams says from the table, and Bucky points at him.

"He tried five more times!" he says. "Steve's the most stubborn sonofabitch you've ever seen. Trust me, if Steve were Captain America, the war'd be over by now. He'd just look at the Krauts like it was a back-alley brawl in Brooklyn and they'd surrender."

"I'm sorry," says Jones, because he's apparently the only one of them who can still track the conversation at this point in the evening (or rather, morning), "did you say your friend tried to enlist _six times_ and got 4F'ed each time?"

"He kept trying different stations saying he was from different places," Bucky explains.

"If he was already lying on his enlistment form, why didn't he lie about the _asthma_?" Ingrams demands.

"Because he's got _principles_ ," Bucky says with an expansive gesture.

"That makes no sense," says Ingrams.

"Who cares? Let's hear it for Steve!" says Dum Dum, raising his pint. It doesn't take much to get Dum Dum to make a toast.

Bucky drinks, and then raises his own pint again. "Let's hear it for Captain America!"

The rest of the regiment roars with approval, and Bucky can almost forget that tomorrow it's back to the front.

**9**

"Here's how this is going to work," Hill says, leading Sam and Steve through the facility. "I'm going to bring him up to speed on being out of commission for seventy years. You're going to stay in the observation room. I'm going to ask him if he has any questions. You're going to stay in the observation room. I'm not going to say a word about the Winter Soldier, and you're going to stay in the observation room. He tried to kill both of you, so you're potential triggers. That hurdle is going to have to be handled separately, and so you're going to _stay in the observation room_. Do you understand?"

"Let me guess," Steve says. "The Winter Soldier is a trigger, too."

"Anything is potentially a trigger," Hill says. "But we're not going to read him the dictionary and the entire works of Shakespeare to see if any words or phrases make him want to kill us. Not at this stage, anyway."

"Shakespeare? Really?" Sam says.

Hill sighs. "Three separate agents compromised by three separate organizations. I don't know why they all go for Shakespeare. It was Gilbert and Sullivan, once. We didn't find that one out until the agent in question went to a community theater production of _Ruddigore_. Thank God it wasn't a violent trigger."

"What kind of trigger was it?" Sam asks.

Hill grimaces. "Singing. Apparently the employee in question hired a street hypnotist for his daughter's birthday party and then volunteered to be in a demonstration. He's the reason I had to write up official mandatory clown, hypnotist, puppeteer and other childrens' entertainment vetting procedures." She stops at a door and faces Sam and Steve. "I know you have your doubts," she says, looking Steve in the eye, "but try not to forget that if HYDRA does have plans for him, it's not going to matter whether he's your friend or not. We don't know if he's a threat, and until we do, we have to treat him like he is. I don't think your friend would appreciate it if he killed you, the rest of us, and who knows how many other people because you _missed_ him."

Steve meets her gaze and doesn't flinch away. "I know," he says.

"And," Hill continues, "even if that is who you say it is, we have no way of knowing that triggering him won't make that part of him go away forever, and I don't think any of us want that."

Steve's jaw tenses so hard that it almost aches. "No, we definitely don't."

Hill shifts her attention to Sam. "Don't let him do anything stupid," she says, her tone making it clear that she's already resigned to the aforementioned stupidity.

"That's basically why I'm here," Sam says, and Hill opens the door.

"It's a one-way mirror," she says, "not a display, so don't tap on the glass. Wilson, take this." She pulls a small device out of her pocket and hands it to Sam. "We injected him with a subcutaneous sedation delivery system. If anything starts to go wrong, push that button and it'll at least buy me some time."

Steve bites his tongue against his kneejerk offense. "Anything else you did to him that we should know about?" he says, trying to keep his voice even.

"Well, none of us have a clue what to do about the arm, so no," Hill says. "In case of an _actual_ emergency, I'm counting on you guys to break the glass and jump through like big damn heroes. Anything else before I go in?"

Steve wanders over to the glass, looking through at Bucky. He looks just like he did in the display in the briefing room - the blankness on his face isn't the emptiness of the Winter Soldier, but the fully inhabited concentration that Steve remembers seeing on Bucky's face so many times, behind a sniper scope or examining maps of troop movements or trying to figure out if Falsworth was bluffing on the long, slow hours waiting to start an op.

"Yeah," he says. "You're about to tell him that everything he knows is wrong and just about everyone he cares about is dead." He looks over his shoulder at Hill. "SHIELD didn't do so well breaking that news last time, as I recall. Try to do better this time."

For the first time, Steve sees Hill's face go gentle - a subtle softening of her features and a gleam of understanding in her eyes. "Yes, sir," she says quietly, and turns to continue down the hallway.

Sam comes all the way into the observation room, letting the door close behind him. "How'd they break the news to you?" he asks.

"They didn't," Steve says. "They tried to make me think it was 1945, until I broke out of their facility and found myself in the middle of Times Square."

Sam hisses an inhalation in sympathy. "Bit of a rude awakening."

"Little bit," Steve agrees.

"You gonna be okay with this?" Sam asks, gesturing at the glass.

"Don't have much of a choice, do I?" Steve says.

"You think you could do better?"

Steve situates himself in front of the glass, leaving Sam room to look through the glass too. "I don't know," he says softly. "I thought when I found him I'd know what to do, but…"

"Didn't exactly see this coming," Sam finishes.

Through the glass, Hill opens the door to the cell. Bucky's eyes follow her as she meticulously closes it again behind her and crosses to the table, setting her stack of files in front of her.

"Congratulations, Sergeant Barnes," she says, "we're at least partly convinced that you are who you say you are."

Bucky raises his eyebrows, clearly not even a little convinced himself.

"My name is Maria Hill. I'm one of the good guys, by which I mean I am not and nor have I ever been affiliated with HYDRA," Hill says.

Bucky's eyebrows go even higher, his head tilting slightly as if under the weight of his own skepticism.

"I'm afraid I have some bad news," Hill continues, flipping over a folder. "In your most recent memory, can you tell me what year it was?"

Bucky says nothing, but something shifts in his expression. It's an ominous question, to be sure, but Steve doesn't see any confusion or disbelief, just dread.

"Okay, or you can just glare at me," Hill says. "I'm going to assume that you would've answered 1945. It's now 2014. You've missed almost seventy years."

Steve watches the rise and fall of Bucky's Adam's apple as he swallows and sets his jaw.

"He doesn't believe her," Steve says quietly.

"Can't say I'm surprised," Sam says, shaking his head. "She's got to work on her bedside manner."

"You've missed a lot," Hill continues. "The war's over, by the way. Obviously the Allies won. The Strategic Scientific Reserve became SHIELD, the Strategic Homeland Intervention and Enforcement Division. Its first Director was Peggy Carter, whom I believe you know." Hill slides a black-and-white photograph across the table towards Bucky. "She's retired now, obviously. So are the other surviving Howling Commandos - Jim Morita, Gabe Jones, and Timothy Dugan. Jacques Dernier passed away in 2003 of pancreatic cancer, and James Falsworth in 2008 of heart failure." After a moment's hesitation, Hill adds, "At least until recently, you were thought to be the only Howling Commando to die in the war."

Bucky keeps his eyes on the picture, staring at it as though it might turn into a snake and bite him.

"Your sister Rebecca still lives in Brooklyn," Hill continues. "She was the first female professor of Computer Science at Columbia, thanks to some of the intelligence work she did during the war."

Bucky's brows come together into half-frown, still looking at the picture, and Hill opens the top file.

"Work which was apparently classified until 1972," she says, and then takes a brief breath. "I'm afraid your other sisters, Myrtle and Agnes, passed away. Myrtle was in a car accident in 1963, and Agnes of cancer in 1996. You have three nephews, four nieces, and a whole collection of great-nephews and -nieces."

Bucky's lips tighten into what might be a smile if it weren't so pained. "No pictures of them?" he says, his voice harsh with sarcasm.

"I can find you some," Hill says evenly.

"She could've asked," Steve mutters.

"You've got pictures?" Sam asks.

Steve shrugs. "I thought it might help when we found him, to know that he's not alone. One of his nephews is named after him, but they call him Jimmy."

Bucky reaches out and touches the edge of the SHIELD picture with the fingertips of his flesh-and-blood hand. The handcuff clatters against its mooring in the table.

"There's a lot of history I skipped, obviously," says Hill. "A few more wars. Some recent events. Do you have any questions?"

Bucky licks his lips, a small motion as he folds his lips backs to expose as little of his tongue as possible.

"Anything?" Hill prompts.

Bucky swallows again, and then says, faintly, "So Cap…?"

Hill moves the middle file in her stack up to the top. 

"A plane designed by Johann Schmidt was found in Greenland three years ago," Hill says, and pulls a glossy picture out of the folder, laying it on top of the SHIELD picture. "It had been buried in ice since Captain Steve Rogers was declared Killed in Action bringing it - and Schmidt - down."

Bucky stares at the picture. Steve can't see which picture it is from this angle, but -

"She's gonna tell him, right?" he says.

"Steve - " says Sam.

"She's not just gonna leave it - "

Bucky reaches up with his right hand and pulls the picture closer to him. His lips are pressed together, like he's going to be sick, and the rims of his eyes are slowly going red.

Hill takes out another picture. Steve can see the bright red, white, and blue of his uniform as she puts it on top of the other picture.

"SHIELD recovered his body," she says, and Sam puts a hand on Steve's chest before Steve even realizes he's made for the door.

"She's gotta know what she's doing, man," Sam says, but he sounds unsure. "Sussing out the programming, or whatever."

"This is cruel," Steve says, looking Sam in the eye. Sam glances back at the cell, then back at Steve.

"For you or for him?" he says. "Just - let's see what her play is, okay?"

Steve looks back through the glass. Bucky's sitting back in his chair, shoulders slumped, somehow managing to look resigned and confused and broken all at once.

"Aw, God, Buck," Steve says quietly.

"The deterioration wasn't what they expected, given how much time had passed," Hill continues, but Steve doesn't let himself relax until she says, "Because nobody knew exactly what the serum would do, they tried resuscitating him. It was successful."

Bucky's eyes snap up to Hill. "What?" he says, his voice creaking.

"You can see him, if you want," Hill says, and Steve's whole body is tense like a bowstring, just waiting for the word -

"Are you _friggin' kidding me_ , of course I want to - " says Bucky, and Steve's already out the door of the observation room.

" - can be arranged - " Hill is saying as Steve opens the cell door. Hill looks up, then looks away in what Steve recognizes as being as close to an eye-roll as she'll allow herself while she's on assignment like this. "Apparently immediately."

"Bucky," says Steve, because he doesn't know what else to say. Then he points to the glass, turning his body but unable to make himself look away. "Sorry, I was just - observing…"

" _Steve_ ," says Bucky, and Steve takes a breath for what feels like the first time in seventy years.

"Could you give us a minute," he says to Hill, unable to take his eyes off Bucky.

Hill actually laughs at that. "No."

"I wasn't asking," Steve says.

"I don't care," Hill says.

"Hill," Steve says, and with an aggrieved look, she joins him outside, pulling the door shut behind her.

"I'm not letting you in there alone," she says immediately.

"He doesn't trust you," Steve says. "Not even a little bit, and - "

"I don't care if he trusts me or not! I just don't want anyone else dying, is that too much to ask?"

"Okay, I understand that you don't trust him, either, but - "

"It's not just him I don't trust," Hill says.

Steve blinks. "What?"

"On the Helicarrier, you were on comms until you hit the water, and I didn't hear an overabundance of you trying _not_ to get yourself killed," Hill says. "So yeah, when it comes to that guy in there, no matter who's in that body, I don't trust you either."

Steve is silent for a long moment. "There's really nobody, nobody in the world, that you'd die for?"

"Of course there is," Hill says. "That's why I surround myself with people who know better than to let me."

"Sam will be watching the whole time," Steve says, changing tactics. "And if anything happens, he can put Bucky out of commission."

Hill looks at him, shaking her head slightly. "Has anyone ever told you you're a stubborn son of a bitch?"

"I'm surprised General Phillips didn't have them put it on my grave," Steve says honestly.

"Fine," Hill says. "But you only get to play the 'Captain's orders' card so many times, Rogers. I'd be careful about when you use it."

"Believe me, I am," Steve says, and goes back into the interrogation room alone.

Bucky watches him warily as he enters, as though he can't quite believe that Steve's here, or that he's real - and under the circumstances, Steve can't really blame him. The uncertainty that he felt the first time he came in rears its head again, and after a moment's hesitation, he takes Hill's vacated seat.

He has a better view of the pictures Hill set out earlier as he sits down, and the one on top is, indeed, his frozen body. It's a little disconcerting.

"Sorry," Steve says again. "Agent Hill's a little bit paranoid at the moment. Well, I'm not - paranoid maybe isn't the right word, since everyone really is trying to…"

Bucky is still staring, and Steve's sentence dies in the face of the only thing that matters.

"I'm," Steve says, and his throat closes up. He swallows hard and says, "I'm so glad you're alive."

Bucky looks away, taking a deep, uneven breath, and Steve's heart almost stops until Bucky looks back at him with an unsteady smile and says, "Same to you, punk. The hell is this I hear about you putting Schmidt's plane in the ice?"

Steve laughs - he can't help it, a choked sound that rises out of him without any conscious thought. "It seemed like a good idea at the time," he says.

"And in _Greenland_?" Bucky continues, and as he shakes his head, Steve ignores the brightness in his eyes. "You could've at least tried for the Polo Grounds."

"I hate to break it to you," Steve says, "but the Dodgers moved to California. So did the Giants, actually. Los Angeles and San Francisco instead of Brooklyn and Manhattan."

Bucky's mouth hangs open with disgust. "You're kidding."

"I wish," says Steve wistfully.

"What kind of crappy future did you wake me up in?" Bucky says, and his voice is only a little bit strangled.

Steve doesn't have an answer for that, and the silence stretches as Steve tries to find something to say that isn't _the kind I wish I hadn't woken up in, either_ , and the camaraderie and the soft glint of joy that had been in Bucky's eyes since Steve walked in goes out, replaced by something more guarded - more suspicious.

"I guess it's been a while," Bucky says slowly, his eyes on Steve as he curves his lips in an obviously fake smile. "Remember the night before I shipped out? When we went on that double-date with Connie and...what was your date's name again?"

This is a test. Steve knows this is a test, and he knows the answer that Bucky's looking for, but he also knows the _right_ answer.

"Claire," Steve says, and the false smile slips off Bucky's face.

"It was - "

" _You_ told me it was Caitlin," Steve continues, "so there I was, calling her Caitlin for half the night until at the peanut stand she says, 'You know Caitlin's my sister, right?' She wouldn't talk to me for the rest of the night, and the only reason I didn't tell _your_ date what a humongous lug you were was because I didn't want to ruin your last night at home."

"Caitlin didn't have a sister," Bucky says, but now there's an angle to the corners of his mouth that could be the start of genuine humor. "I would've known if - "

"Well, apparently she did, and Claire seemed like a very nice girl, except for the part where she hated my guts."

Bucky licks his lips again, and Steve can see the way he's tugging them down to keep from smiling and all Steve wants suddenly, more than anything, is to see a full-fledged grin on that ugly mug, to make Bucky laugh.

"'Course, that doesn't hold a candle to that vicious rumor you spread about me and spiders to all of the Commandos."

Bucky looks up at the ceiling, shaking his head, and there's that grin Steve missed so much.

"Sorry, pal, but it's not a rumor if it's true," he says.

"I'm not afraid of spiders, you jerk, and I never have been," Steve says. "I _hate_ spiders because they're disgusting and have too many legs. That's not the same as being afraid of them."

"Sure," Bucky drawls, "but I lived in that shabby old apartment too and I woke up with one crawling across my face just as many times as you did, but I sure as hell didn't wake up the rest of the building screaming."

" _Yelling_ ," Steve corrects him immediately, "it was _yelling_."

Bucky finally laughs, and Steve smiles out of a reflex that hasn't been used in years. But Bucky's laughter doesn't last forever, and the levity fades slowly from Bucky's face as he looks at Steve, replaced by wide eyes filled with a strange mix of wonder and resignation.

"It's really you, isn't it," Bucky says, and Steve's throat tightens again.

"Yeah, Buck," Steve says quietly. "It's really me."

"What - " says Bucky, and his voice briefly fails. He licks his lips, and when he talks again, it comes out at once easier and more forced, and Steve knows it's not what he was going to ask. "What the hell happened to my _hair_?"

It would be funny, except that even the Winter Soldier's hair was a calculated decision on HYDRA's part: long enough to hide his face from security cameras, bangs short enough not to obscure his vision, and since most of the Winter Soldier's work was done at a distance, it didn't matter that it was a combat hazard.

"It's what happens when you don't cut it," Steve says instead, trying for what levity he can find, and Bucky gives a strained smile and nod, acknowledging that stupid questions get stupid answers.

"And - " he says, and stops again. Steve's stomach clenches. Bucky's smiles trembles at the corners, a tense, jagged line across his face. "What happened to my arm?"

Steve tries not to stare as he tries to find an answer, but a heavy knock on the observation mirror behind him interrupts him. Bucky glances past Steve at the glass with a frown.

"Apparently I can't tell you that," Steve says eventually, heavily. 

Bucky snorts. "Since when do you listen to orders?" 

"Look, everything's just - really complicated right now…" Steve trails off, well aware of how poor an excuse it really is, so he starts over. "We're still trying to figure out exactly what's going on. There's a lot that even we don't know, but we're - we're trying to figure it out, and once we know what's happening, we'll have more to tell you."

Bucky stares at him with obvious incredulity, and then lifts both of his hands as high as the handcuffs will let him. Steve tries not to react to the metal hand, even though he can almost feel it against his jaw - 

"Can you tell me why I'm handcuffed to the goddamn table?" Bucky demands.

"Buck - "

"Is this because of that Hill dame? Are you really taking orders from _her_? Hell, Agent Carter I could understand, at least she had a sense of humor, but every time Hill comes into the room I expect her to start peeling her face off like Schmidt did."

Steve rubs his forehead. "I trust her. Maria Hill is one of the few people that I can say with absolute certainty is not working with HYDRA."

"Yeah? You sure about that?" Bucky says. "You sure this isn't some kind of HYDRA trick?"

Steve sighs. "You have no idea how much I wish I knew the answer to that."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"It means - do you trust me?"

"What the hell kind of question is that? Of course I do!"

"Then I'm sorry, Buck, I really am, but can you just trust me on this?" Steve says, and he can hear the pleading in his own voice. "Just - give us some time to figure this out, and I swear to God once we know it's safe for everyone…" Bucky's watching him, and Steve says lamely, "This is for you as much as it's for anyone else."

Bucky looks away suddenly, a vicious swooping turn of his head, and he gives the wall of the interrogation room a suspiciously wet glare. Steve knows this expression, too, the prelude to furious tears. He saw it when Bucky managed to break his hand with a misaligned punch in Brooklyn, when he was angry at himself for not getting it lined up right and angry at himself for how much it hurt; saw it when Bucky caught a bullet just above his ankle and his hands trembled so much with the pain that he couldn't steady his rifle and had to sit the mission out until they could get back to a medic.

But now Bucky just swallows it down with a deep breath and turns back to Steve with still-bright eyes and tight lips.

"Okay," he says, clipped. "I trust you."

Steve hears the unspoken 'but.' He takes it for what it is. At least Bucky hasn't actually tried to break out, which is more than Steve could've said at this point in his own wakeup.

"Thank you," Steve says, and means it. 

"So," says Bucky after a minute. "You've been back for, what, three years? Anything I should know about the future? Other than that bullshit about the Dodgers."

Steve feels a small smile grow on his face. "You're gonna love the internet," he says. "It's kind of like a newspaper, but anyone can see it and anyone can put stuff up there. It's all pin-ups and pictures of cats." He remembers something Natasha had sent him to 'help him get used to the 21st century,' and adds, "And sometimes both at once."

The door to the interrogation room opens, and Hill stands in the doorway with her hip braced against the door. "Minute's up," she says.

Steve looks back at Bucky, then back at Hill. He opens his mouth, and Hill raises her eyebrows, tilting her head pointedly towards the hallway.

He turns back to Bucky. "I'll be back," he promises. "Just as soon as I can, I'll be back."

Bucky's gaze flickers from Steve to Hill, and he sits back in his chair. "All right," he says, his voice hollow. 

"I will," Steve repeats as he gets up. He looks at Hill. "Can we at least leave the…?"

"The files can stay," Hill says, and Steve pushes them across the table so that Bucky can reach, even in his handcuffs.

"It might help you get caught up," Steve says. "It's - I know it's a lot."

"I always loved history in school," Bucky murmurs, pulling the files towards himself, and Steve forces a laugh at the joke - Bucky had hated just about everything about school, even though he was good at it, anxious to get a job to help his family.

Steve follows Hill out of the interrogation room, and after the door closes, he says, "Was I getting too close to something?"

"Limiting exposure to potential triggers usually involves actually making the potential triggers leave eventually," Hill says. "He's on his own for a while."

Steve raises his eyebrows. "You're just going to leave him in there?"

"Yes," Hill says, unrepentant. "Of all of us, he's the only one who got any sleep last night, and we're all overdue for a meal and a nap and, at least in my case, a shower. Right now, he's in better condition than any of us."

"He was asleep because you sedated him," Steve points out.

"Are you going to get off your high horse at any point in this process, or should I just get used to it?" Hill asks. "We're doing what we have to do, and I happen to think it's the right thing, which for now involves him sitting alone in a room for a while while the rest of us tend to our own basic needs." Hill glances back at the door, and then back at Steve. "And I guess we'll get him lunch at some point, too." She turns down the hallway and starts walking, saying over her shoulder, "Do you want McDonald's or Burger King?"

**vii**

It's hard to keep track of the days. Bucky tried, at first, so that he could put dates on the letters he sent to his sisters, but then there was no paper anyway and he doesn't know what to tell them. He doesn't know how to let them know that he can feel it already: The guy who comes back isn't going to be the guy who left.

But it's some day that starts off just as friggin' gray and miserable as all the rest have been, the sky blown over with smoke and dust and a fog that wets the dirt just enough to make it stick to the elbows of Bucky's uniform while he tries to give his men cover. The shelling goes all day until the dim, halfhearted sunlight gives in and packs it up, and then everyone's just seeing by firelight and gunblasts.

At least at first.

At first, Bucky almost thinks they're Allied, because all of a sudden all the Germans are just up and disappearing, disintegrating into blue light and a little bit of smoke. But the uniforms are just as unfamiliar as the guns, and then the guns are pointed at him and Dum Dum and everyone else and he can pick out a German accent a mile away at this point, so it's obvious when the guy holding the bizarre gun says, "Surrender or we will kill you all."

Also, it's not exactly the kind of heartwarming message Bucky expects from the home front.

"Who the fuck are - " says Ingrams, and then there's a bright blue light and a collection of loose mist and there's no Ingrams anymore.

"Surrender," the Kraut repeats.

"Hydra," Jones mutters from somewhere behind Bucky.

Their Captain's dead. Their Colonel's dead. Bucky doesn't see anyone else around in a position to make decisions, and he's their goddamn Sergeant and he's not about to get them killed.

He puts his hands behind his head. "We surrender."

The German nods and starts shouting to the others - somehow Bucky still hasn't picked up a damn word of German - and they start dividing up the prisoners for transport.

They get put to work at a factory, moving equipment and loading it. Most of it glows blue, just like the weapons that the guards carry, but it takes less than two days for MacFarlane's skin to start going red from it, crosshatched patterns where the weave of his shirt blocked out whatever's coming off of it.

Then he starts coughing.

Doesn't help that he'd confessed to Bucky he'd almost been 4F'ed himself, because of some childhood illness that stuck around in his lungs in long, wet winters. Bucky watches as, over the course of about a week, MacFarlane's steps start to stumble, his feet sliding against the ground. His cheeks are damn pale where they aren't burned and chapped, and if Bucky sits too close to him in their circular barred cell, he can feel the halfhearted fever-heat coming off of him.

Steve's mom was a nurse, and God knows Bucky heard enough about Steve's various illnesses to be able to tell when it's bad. This is bad enough that their medic, Fredericks, won't look at MacFarlane unless he's examining him, and even then he won't meet his eyes.

"It's the blue stuff doing it to him, but hell if I know what it's _doing_ ," Fredericks says, voice tight. "There's not - Bucky, unless there's a miracle, it's a matter of time, and not a lot of it."

Bucky looks across the crowded cell. Dum Dum's shoulder blocks his view of MacFarlane's face. Everybody else is doing okay, more or less, but there's so little food and water going around that it's close. One less person might make a difference. Bucky would be disgusted with his own relief, but that takes more energy than he's got these days. He'll still be damn sorry to see MacFarlane go.

"You did what you could," Bucky says, and puts a hand on Fredericks's shoulder. "I got it from here."

He walks across the settle, weaving through the men - some of them his, some from other units brought here from other battles - until he can sit next to MacFarlane and lean his head back against the bars.

"Saw you talking to Fred," MacFarlane says. His voice is a rasp. "How long've I got?"

"Not looking so great, Farley," Bucky says.

"Just wanted to stick it to the Germans," MacFarlane says. "My dad died in the Great War, did I ever say that?"

"No," Bucky lies. "You never said."

"Well, he did, so as far as I'm concerned the whole damn country can go straight to hell," MacFarlane says.

"Sure can," Bucky agrees.

"Not sure I can get up again," MacFarlane says. Bucky doesn't say anything, and eventually MacFarlane continues, "This isn't how I want to go, lying down like a dog."

"Don't have anything much better to give you, Farley," Bucky says. He didn't know a person could feel so empty.

MacFarlane snorts out a laugh, which becomes a cough. He spits thick blood into his hand and wipes it on his uniform pants.

"Try to get some sleep," Bucky says. Maybe if he's lucky, he won't wake up.

MacFarlane stays silent for a while - a long while, long enough that Bucky'd check for a pulse if he weren't afraid of what he'd find - and then, against all odds, begins to sing.

It's a song that Bucky recognizes: one that Steve's mom used to sing. Before his lungs finally did him in, Steve's dad sang it, too, and they'd sing it together in Steve's apartment or in the park - they sang it fierce, like a rallying cry, until Steve's mom sang it alone like a dirge. It's some song about a minstrel who dies and a harp and a sword, but the basic gist of it is clear: it's a fuck-you to the Germans and the Allies who aren't coming for them and the war for existing at all.

Farley's sung it before, taught them the words on long marches when he got sick of singing _Hitler Only Has One Ball_ or _Filthy Annie from Trapani_ for the twentieth time, so some of the other boys know it. Fredericks and a couple of the other guys join in on the next verse, and the song begins to grow, echoing through more than just their cell, and that's the problem with just using bars, isn't it, everyone can hear what everyone else is doing. Bucky sings too, now, as loud as he can, the way that Steve's mom and dad would sing it together.

Bucky doesn't even notice the guard behind him until the muzzle of the gun is pressed against the back of MacFarlane's head, and MacFarlane, too, disappears in a blaze of light.

The HYDRA guard says, in a rough accent, "No singing," and moves on.

**8**

Sam and Steve debrief with Fury while Hill goes out to get food.

"Don't you have to debrief, too?" Sam asks her, and she gives a thin, humorless smile.

"I'm going to debrief separately," she says. "I have a feeling my impressions are going to be pretty different from yours."

The debrief itself is basically a rehash of the same argument they've been having since Steve and Sam arrived: Steve arguing that Bucky is who he says he is, and Fury arguing that the Winter Soldier is too dangerous to take any chances.

"When you put it like that, it sounds like you never want to let him out," Steve says.

"Of course we want to let him out," Fury says. "We don't have anywhere near the resources to keep a man in a cell for the rest of his life."

Steve inadvertently destroys another chairback.

When Hill gets back with bags of food, she takes them to one of the other rooms in the complex, a small kitchenette that at least has a table and some chairs.

"Let me guess," Steve says to her. "You're going to tell Fury that Bucky's a threat and I can't be trusted."

"Stop stating the obvious," Hill tells him, and leaves.

"You know," Sam says, unwrapping a cheeseburger, "I have to say, all of this is really putting my problems in perspective."

Steve slowly and silently unwraps his own burger.

"Too soon?" Sam says apologetically.

"No," Steve says, "no, it's just."

"Yeah," Sam says eventually. "Yeah, I can respect that."

"They're never going to believe that he's not a threat," Steve continues. "No matter what Fury says, they're never going to want to let him go."

"I hate to say it, man," Sam says, "but they're probably in that room saying _you're_ never going to believe he _is_ a threat, and can you tell me they're wrong?"

"He shot me four times," Steve says, his voice sharper than he intends, "I think I know how much of a threat he is."

Sam tilts his head in thought. "I guess that's something, at least," he says. "He never went for the headshot."

Steve groans, his cheeseburger forgotten in front of him as he puts his face in his hands.

"You still having the nightmares, man?" Sam asks.

"I would have to sleep to have nightmares," Steve says, "but – now and then."

"They still about him?"

Steve lifts his face from his hands, clasping them in front of his face instead. "Some of them."

"It's understandable," Sam tells him. "Whether it was his fault or not, it was a guy with his face that tried to kill you. That's traumatic."

"It's not just that. Bucky hated Zola and HYDRA, probably more than the rest of us, for what they did to him and what they were trying to do to the rest of us. But when it came down to it, they won. At least when it came to Bucky and the Winter Soldier. It was bad enough when they just killed him, but this…"

"I get it," Sam says, with a small, sad half-smile. "I could've guessed from our first run that you'd be a sore loser, too."

"You bet," Steve says, letting his arms fall back to the table. "How am I supposed to tell him that - what was done to him? That he killed all those people, and that he tried to kill me - "

"He's got to know eventually. That's not the kind of thing you just don't bring up."

"I know," Steve says. "But - they used him. It's not just what he did, it's that they _used_ him to do it, and it was _Zola_ of all people…"

Sam frowns in thought. "Zola's the one who had him during the war, right?"

"Yeah."

"Yeah, that might make it all a little more personal. C'mon, man, you gotta at least try to eat something - I'm starving and I don't even have a supersoldier metabolism."

Steve automatically takes a bite of his burger. It tastes, rather unsurprisingly, like a fast-food cheeseburger, but he keeps eating it anyway, just to get the chore of eating out of the way.

"What did Zola do to him?" Sam asks, and Steve swallows a bite that tastes like cardboard and goes down just about as easily.

"Experimented on him," Steve says. "Other than that, he - he wouldn't say. It's not in the Russian files, either."

Sam frowns. "He never talked about it? Not even with you?"

Steve shakes his head. "I thought - I didn't want to push. Not when…when we were kids in Brooklyn, he was always getting me out of the dumb fights I started, pulling me out of trouble, and when I rescued him...I don't know."

"You think you hurt his pride?"

Steve shrugs. "Maybe. And he wasn't the only one who didn't talk about things. It just - it wasn't the same when we were out there. We used to talk to each other about anything and everything, except the things that we didn't even have to say, and then we just...didn't."

Sam nods, absorbing this. "Do you mind if I ask what you didn't talk about?"

Steve looks down at his half-eaten burger. "Do you know where I was when Bucky's unit was captured in Azzano?" he says. "Paramus. I looked it up afterward on my tour schedule. Of course it was _Paramus_ ," he says, with enough disdain that a corner of Sam's mouth curls up. "He was getting tortured while I was selling war bonds and posing with babies. And when he came back, he was...I don't know. He laughed less. He definitely slept less. It's stupid, but even when we were fighting Nazis the one thing I couldn't stand to think about was that he might be angry at me."

"Because you thought you deserved it," Sam finishes.

"Paramus," Steve reminds him. "I knew what I could do by then - I picked up whole motorcycles with chorus girls sitting on them in my act, did you know that? I'd have to go AWOL a hundred times over to make up for what I didn't do, which was take myself to the front lines earlier."

"Steve, you can't blame yourself for - wait, did you say AWOL?"

Steve frowns. "Yeah. My first mission was while I was on tour, not on active duty."

Sam raises his eyebrows and lets out a whistle. "They did _not_ put that into the history books. Damn."

"They left that part out?"

"Yeah, can't imagine why," Sam says. "Let's teach all the elementary school kids who might grow up to be ROTC or enlisted men that Captain America's heroic first mission was against orders."

Steve manages a halfhearted smile at that. "I guess you might have a point."

There's a brief silence as Sam takes another bite of his burger. Steve gives up on his own food and opts for coffee instead. It is possibly the worst coffee he's ever had, including the substitutes during the war that were literally not coffee.

"I should be the one to tell him," Steve says eventually. "He'll - he might take it better, coming from me."

"Mmhmm," Sam says. "And it's got nothing to do with you wanting him to know you don't blame him for trying to kill you, right?"

Steve frowns at him. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Barnes doesn't need your guilt right now," Sam says gently. "And I'm not saying that you shouldn't get to feel it, or that it's not legitimate, but can you honestly say that if you go in there and tell him, it's not going to be about you?"

Steve looks down at the paper cup of coffee between his hands and says nothing.

"You don't have to tell him just to punish yourself," Sam continues, and Steve shakes his head.

"It's not about that," he says. "Bucky deserves to have someone who's there for him, and Hill's a good agent, but she's not exactly a sympathetic ear."

"That might just be the biggest understatement I've ever heard," Sam says dryly. "And I'm not saying it should be Hill, either."

"I just," Steve says. "I just don't know how I'm supposed to look Bucky in the eye and tell him he shot me."

"That's why I'm going to do it," Sam says.

"What? No, Sam, I can't ask you - "

"You still don't get it, do you? _You don't have to ask_. I'm volunteering. Sometimes people just decide to do things for other people, including you, and those people have to suck it up and accept it. Besides, this kind of thing is literally in my job description for the actual job that I actually have. I think that makes me pretty qualified."

"You've already done so much, leaving your job - "

"Nah, man, did I not tell you?" Sam says. "It's a funny story. I go in to hand in my two-weeks' notice and my request to use the two weeks of vacation time I've got backlogged, and my boss pulls me aside and asks me what the hell I'm doing. I say I've got a friend who's going through some stuff and needs some backup and support. My boss says, this friend wear stars and stripes and recently take down an entire government agency on national television? So it turns out that my boss won't let me quit or take any vacation time - he puts me on special assignment to support you, because apparently he thinks you've probably got PTSD from getting out of the ice and fighting aliens and taking down SHIELD and all that. All I have to do is my best to make sure you're doing okay, maybe try to get you to a support group meeting every once in a while, and also try to work out your benefits."

Steve musters a smile, halfhearted though it is. "How's that last one going?"

"I've got another three months of buying my friends in the Benefits Administration drinks before the new forms that they're making from scratch for you are done, and then we can get to work filling them out," Sam says, a gleam in his eye. "And my buddy in the National Cemetery Administration won't take my calls anymore about what we should do with your memorial at Arlington."

Steve winces. "There's a whole memorial?"

"Hell yeah! There's a statue and everything. Still, they can't avoid my calls forever, especially now that we're gonna have to work it out for Barnes, too. At least," Sam adds pointedly, "once we've figured all of this stuff out and I've talked to him about the Winter Soldier thing."

Steve tries to think of an objection that Sam can't spin as guilt (that Steve's part of the reason Bucky's in this situation) or selfishness (that Steve wants to be there for Bucky). None come to mind.

"Besides, this way you don't have to tell Bucky anything he doesn't want to hear, and Hill doesn't have to admit that the guy who tried to kill Nick Fury might be an actual human being who had some pretty terrible stuff happen to him."

Steve lets his head hang forward. Knowing that Sam is right doesn't make it better.

"I'm guessing by the way you're not arguing that you finally agree with me," Sam says.

Steve looks up, reluctantly, and tries at a smile. "I guess I just - I thought it would be easier," he says. "Having Bucky back. I mean, this is...this is what I wanted. He's back and he's him, and I thought this would be better, but…"

"It's never easier," Sam says quietly, "and it's never better. Just different, and eventually it gets to be different-good. Tough lesson number one of coming home."

"I know," Steve says, and rubs his forehead. "And I thought I knew that, but. I guess not."

"It flips everything upside-down, getting what you thought you wanted and finding out it's not like you thought it'd be. I get it."

"Yeah," Steve says, and closes his eyes.

"You okay?"

"It's been a long couple of weeks," Steve says. "I guess I'm a little tired."

"Yeah, because before this your life was so calm and restful," Sam says. "Remember the attack on New York? Practically a day in the spa."

Steve manages a tired grin as he opens his eyes. "I know, I know," he says.

Sam looks at Steve for a moment, his eyes tracking over Steve's face. "This is a different kind of tired, though," he says.

Steve starts rolling his coffee cup between his hands. "I think," he says slowly, "I didn't realize how angry I was until I wasn't anymore. I can't be angry at Bucky. I just can't. But now I just…I don't know what to do." 

Sam nods slowly. "Back to problem number one," he says. "What makes you happy?"

"I still don't know," Steve says.

And it's true. He knows what used to make him happy, but he can't exactly live in his memories of Brooklyn - and to be honest, he wasn't that happy while he was living that life, either, but now the thought of being able to trade those problems for the ones in front of him is irresistible.

"Not even Barnes?" Sam pushes.

"If you'd asked me before all this, I don't know what I would've said," Steve admits. "Maybe I would've even said yes." He stares into his coffee cup. "If you woke up and seventy years had passed and everyone you ever knew was either dead or moved on, can you think of a single thing that'd make you happy?"

"You thought Bucky was dead before you lost seventy years," Sam says. 

"I wasn't supposed to lose _any_ years," Steve says. "I knew what I was doing when I brought that plane down. I made my choice. If I hadn't - if I'd found somewhere to land it - would I have found Bucky sooner?"

"Don't do that to yourself, man," Sam says. "There aren't any answers there."

Steve nods, but says, "Did you know I had two different opportunities to kill Zola, and I didn't do it either time? The first was in Austria. I saw him leaving Bucky's cell, and I didn't go after him because I thought I heard Bucky. The second - well, Gabe was the only other Commando on the train after Bucky fell, and I don't think he would've said a word if we'd brought back a body. But I thought Zola wouldn't be able to hurt anyone else - that turning him in was justice. Instead he just built himself a new HYDRA and - " He can't bring himself to finish.

"It's almost kind of funny," Sam says. "You know, one of the ultimate ethics questions for philosophers is 'if you could go back in time and kill Hitler before he hurt anyone, would you?' Seems like that's what you're talking about - if you could go back in time and kill Zola."

"If I had, Bucky wouldn't be - "

"If you had, Barnes might still be frozen at the bottom of a ravine in Italy," Sam says. "And unless you've got a time-travel device handy, the only thing you're doing is torturing yourself for _not_ murdering someone. Now, call me old-fashioned, but I think you'd be blaming yourself at least as much if it were the other way around. And the way I heard it, it was Zola's intel that got you to Schmidt's plane in the first place. If he'd died, you might not've found it."

Steve rubs his eyes. It's exhaustion that makes him say, "I'd've done it anyway. For Bucky, I'd've done it."

Sam is quiet for a moment. "I'm not judging," he says slowly, "but I'm just saying - you know that's fucked up, right?"

Steve huffs out a laugh. "I know."

"Just making sure," Sam says. "'Cause you're allowed to be fucked up, Captain America or not. Hell, I'd be more worried about you if you weren't."

"Well, you don't have to worry about that."

Sam reaches forward and holds up his paper coffee cup. "Well, Steve, welcome to the Fucked-Up Veterans Club. We meet all day, every day; there's no quitting; and membership is for life."

Steve taps his own cup against Sam's, and they both sip their terrible coffee.

**vi**

Some of the HYDRA guards have their blue weapons. Some carry regular pistols with bullets, and some carry batons. The longer Bucky's at the factory, the more he thinks they get to choose. The ones with the blue guns only step in when they have to, herding and nudging the rest of the prisoners like so much cattle, eyes skipping over them like they're looking at objects set out on a table, not people. The ones with the guns find excuses to trip up the prisoners, watch them for an opportunity to put a gun to the back of someone's head. The ones with the batons don't need excuses. They're the ones that draw it out – that ask questions, that look the prisoners in the eye and smile at what they see.

It makes Bucky wonder which he'd pick. There's something clean about the HYDRA weapons, no muss and no fuss, and part of him doesn't want to give anyone from HYDRA the satisfaction of his attention. The other part of him would give anything for a baton of his own.

He doesn't see the start of the fight, and never finds out what happened. All of a sudden there's a knot of people at the door to the cell and one of the guards is whaling on Fredericks with a baton, smacking him square in the stomach until he doubles over and then raising it over his head and bringing it down. Freddy collapses to the floor, arms underneath him in a disoriented attempt to break the fall, and there's a collective noise of outrage from the rest of the crowd.

Bucky's been in too many fights like this to stay back, and right now Freddy isn't in any more of a position to defend himself than Steve'd be. Old habits die hard.

Bucky's got one arm around the guard's neck in half a second, the other one pulling the hand with the baton up behind the guard's back. Bucky jerks the guard back and swings them around so that he lands on top of the guard, close enough to feel the guard's nose break against the hard factory floor, and then there's another guard trying to get Bucky in a headlock but that's not going to work, Bucky's been getting out of headlocks since before he could even say the word and now he's got that baton he wanted. He gets the second guard square in the kneecap and feels it give, and he'd feel bad except Freddy's just now pushing himself to his hands and knees and there's blood dripping across his face from his hairline and the more Bucky fights, the less the guards are going to remember about Freddy, after all.

It ends up taking four guards - the two Bucky roundly spanked and two more to grab his arms and haul him off. By the time they're done with him, he got in one broken nose, one broken kneecap, at least a couple fractured ribs and some very obvious bruises and cuts; based on the patterns of heat and throbbing on his face, they got in some cuts and bruises of their own, although he's pretty sure his nose is intact, and they used his stomach and ribs like a punching bag but it doesn't feel like anything's broken except a rip in the sleeve of his sweater.

They're the kind of goddamn bullies that know how to make it hurt without doing any lasting damage. Just for that, Bucky spits blood onto one of their shoes.

"What is this?" One of the scientist-types comes walking through, short and curly-haired and four-eyed. He looks from Bucky to the guards to where Freddy's supporting himself leaning against the cell entrance.

A guard begins to answer in German, and the scientist says, sounding bored, "Speak English. They should know what you are saying if you want them to obey you."

The guard says, "There was a fight, Doctor Zola. It is taken care of."

Zola looks around. "Who started it?"

The guard looks over at Freddy.

"Then it is not taken care of, is it?" Zola says.

A guard pulls his gun, and then half of Freddy's head is splattered across the floor of the cell. Bucky closes his eyes, but doesn't try to fight the guards holding him by the shoulders.

"And this one?" Zola says.

Bucky thinks, _Oh, Jesus_ , and squeezes his eyes further shut even as he hears the guard recock the gun. He tells himself, what feels like over and over again but not that much time passes so it can't really be, that it's okay, that he's ready, that they can kill him but they can't take the fight out of him -

"That will not be necessary," says Zola, and when Bucky opens his eyes again, Zola's watching him. "Bring him to the isolation ward. We are in need of more subjects, and this one is a fighter. Perhaps he will last longer than the others."

He gets a cell of his own, which is probably why they call it the isolation ward. The first time they take him out, he thinks they're going to put him up against a wall and shoot him in the back of the head, but instead they take him to another room, with a desk and examination table and a whole mess of equipment hanging from the ceiling above it. It almost reminds him of the physical exam station from when he'd enlisted, except that table hadn't had leather restraints hanging from the sides.

"Onto the table," says one guard, the barrel of his pistol in the small of Bucky's back. If it weren't for the four others, Bucky might try to get the drop on him. As it is, Bucky considers it anyway. A shot to the head is probably less painful than whatever that Doctor Zola has in store for him, but he'd said they needed more subjects. If Bucky died, Zola'd probably just go down the list to someone else in his unit and that'd hardly be fair. (It's almost sad that Bucky can't even convince himself anymore that they just have to make it until help comes. He knows where they were when they got nabbed, and he knows that the only help that's coming is going to be the end of the war itself.)

That's always been Bucky's philosophy, to a certain extent: better me than you. All those years of taking beatings and breaking up fights for Steve taught Bucky how to fight, and fight to win. Maybe he'll come out of this knowing something worth knowing, too.

He gets on the table. He doesn't even make a fuss when the guards fasten the restraints, just picks a spot on the ceiling and stares at it, preparing himself for whatever they're going to try on him. They do it quickly and easily, chatting to each other in German as they buckle him to the table he's probably going to die on.

"Thank you, that will be all," says Zola, and Bucky turns his head to see Zola coming into the room. He's wearing gloves. "I hope you understand," Zola says, coming closer to Bucky, "there are some questions that I will have to ask you. I do not enjoy asking them, and you will not enjoy answering them, but we must justify our conversations to the Fuhrer somehow, at least for now. But there are other questions I will ask you that I will ask for science, and I hope you will answer those honestly, or this will be much less pleasant and much more likely to kill you. I trust you will be able to tell which questions are which."

Bucky doesn't lick his lips, but he looks up at the light above him and says, "James Buchanan Barnes. Sergeant. 32557."

Zola sighs. "That will be tiresome."

Like Bucky cares.

"Then we will begin," says Zola, and out of the corner of his eye Bucky can see Zola hold up a syringe. "The first question is one that I am required to ask you. Have the Americans broken the Enigma code?"

"James Buchanan Barnes. Sergeant. 32557."

Bucky feels the pinch of the needle, and squeezes his eyes shut - he doesn't know whether to expect something to make him loopy to get him talking or just pain.

"The second question is one in the name of science," Zola says. "Could you describe the sensation in your left arm?"

Bucky says, "James Buchanan Barnes."

The sensation is cold, like someone's pumping ice water into his veins, spreading in burning icy threads until he can't feel anything below the injection site.

"Sergeant."

The next one is burning, like red-hot ants crawling under his skin and he can feel the wetness trickling from his eyes to his temples but he forces himself to breathe through it.

"32557."

Then he starts to lose track. Whatever they're giving him must be messing with his head, because he eventually opens his eyes back in his solitary cell, curled up in a ball on the floor with his arms stretched out in front of him, delicately positioned to avoid any pressure on his forearms, which are marked with more punctures than he remembers getting stuck with.

One of them is still bleeding, so he forces himself up and leaves a small smudge of blood on a bare stretch of cell wall with his thumb. It's the closest he's going to come to a calendar, after all.

That's the only way he can keep track of how much time passes. It all blurs together otherwise, the name-rank-serial-number spat through gritted teeth and whispered through trembling lips and screamed with such force it can't have been coherent, but that's a good thing, because the louder he screams, the more he lets his throat tear itself apart, the less likely he is to say anything else.

They don't always bother asking questions, and about seven days in a row they don't say a word to him before they jab him, and each time he wakes up shivering and numb on the floor of his cell, ice crystals clinging to his hair and touches of blue to the tips of his toes and fingers. There's less blue each time, though, and the last time he just wakes up cold, making him wonder if he imagined the ice entirely.

Other days it's obvious that it's not just his body they're after, whatever they're doing to him. They try to get him to solve puzzles, do math problems, answer riddles after giving him things that make him sweat and shake and, one time, taste the smell of a July rainstorm so perfectly clearly that he can't even talk, just breaks down in tears from how badly he wants to be there, to be home, to be anywhere else, to be dead already. 

Zola seems particularly pleased that day.

He fixes in his mind each and every bloody thumbprint he puts on the wall, so he can differentiate the days by what he was thinking about when he put it there. The first was when he'd get the feeling back in his left arm; the second was trying to decide how he'd kill Zola if he ever got the chance; the third was wondering if his sisters remembered to put fresh flowers on his dad's grave; and so on.

He tries not to notice when there start being more thumbprints than he can remember putting there. It would feel too much like surrender.

**7**

"The facility's been cleared," Hill says when they all reconvene in the briefing room. "The other team's cleared out, which means it's just us now. We found some living quarters, including some with enhanced security - "

"You can say 'cells,'" Steve says.

Hill taps one finger on the surface of the briefing table, caught out, and glances quickly at Fury. "Well, whatever you want to call them, we found them," she says. "Under the circumstances, we're willing to consider moving him. Figure he might be less hostile if he isn't handcuffed to a table."

"Does this plan to move him involve you holding a gun on him?" Steve asks. "Because if he still thinks you're HYDRA and sees an opportunity to escape, he'll take it."

"If he starts trying to kill me, whether he thinks I'm HYDRA or not, I'm going to defend myself," Hill says flatly. "It's not my fault if he doesn't believe us, and on one of the admittedly rare occasions that we're telling the truth. So, yes, the plan was to be armed."

"This is a recipe for disaster," Steve says, "and I find it hard to believe that you don't know that."

"I think keeping him somewhere without access to a urinal is a recipe for disaster," Hill says.

"If he has subcutaneous sedatives - " Sam begins.

"I think I have a solution that doesn't involve the two of you killing each other before Barnes even has a chance to try for himself," Fury cuts in. "Before everything went all to hell, some agents in our tech division developed a tranquilizer gun capable of bringing down supersoldiers dosed with Extremis. If it worked on them, it'll probably work on Barnes. It's nonlethal, no side effects." Fury raises his eyebrows high enough to clear the top of his sunglasses' frame. "That good enough, Rogers?"

Steve still doesn't like the idea of anyone shooting Bucky, but it's better than nothing. "Fine. But I want to be there."

"You can wait for him in his cell," Hill says. "If his mission is still to kill Captain America, you being around during the move has too many variables."

"But putting him alone in a room with Steve is fine?" Sam asks.

"Putting him in a room equipped with surveillance with me watching his every move with the subcutaneous sedative's activator in my hand is, yes," Hill says. 

"You mean, if he's alone in a more comfortable room with me after a show of kindness from his captors, he might be more likely to talk," Steve says.

Hill shrugs, unrepentant. "That too. Possibly also more likely to try to kill you. But hey, I got an extra Happy Meal, so you can at least give him something to eat. It even comes with a little toy. That'll make him like us, right?"

"If you were its upper management, no wonder SHIELD had issues," Sam mutters.

"You'll be doing it on your own," Fury says, standing up. "This isn't the only op running right now, and it looks like there's another that might require my personal touch."

Hill's brow creases the tiniest bit, and she says, "The Centipede situation?"

"Got it in one," Fury says. 

"I'm sorry, I just gotta ask," Sam says, "seeing as I'm now living in a world of covert ops, alien invasions, undead assassins and cyborgs and whatnot - when you say 'Centipede,' is that a codename or did HYDRA, I don't know, genetically engineer a giant monster centipede?"

Fury stares at him. "You gotta stop watching movies, Wilson," he says.

"Okay," Sam says. "Just wanted to make sure."

So Steve ends up waiting in the cell, which is certainly and unmistakably a cell - a cold concrete floor, a cot with a scratchy blanket and a thin pillow in one corner, a small sink and toilet in the opposite corner, and a single bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, which, as Sam mentions, really takes it to the next level of being a cliche.

"You want to stick around?" Steve says, lingering in the doorway of the cell.

"Nah," Sam says. "I spent the past six weeks reading up on the Winter Soldier, not James Buchanan Barnes. If I'm going to be any help at all, I've got some studying to do." He hooks his thumb over his shoulder. "I'll head up to one of the living quarters one floor up and stick a sock on the doorknob or something so you know which one I'm in."

"Sam?" Steve says, as Sam turns to walk away - Sam hesitates. "Thanks. For everything."

Sam shrugs. "No sweat, man."

And then Steve's alone with his thoughts. 

Well, his thoughts, the folder he brought, and the Happy Meal sitting on the bed.

He steps inside the cell, pacing briefly around it. It isn't very big, and it certainly isn't cozy, and Steve can almost feel the claustrophobia condensing in the air. For all Steve knows, Hill might not intend for Bucky to ever leave this room - or maybe her plan is to hand him over to whichever law enforcement agency will take him at this point. Steve has no doubt that her ultimate intentions are good, but he can't say he agrees with her methods, and Sam's right - she doesn't see Bucky as a person. Right now, she sees him as a threat and a potential source of intelligence. Steve doesn't particularly want to think about what will happen when he's exhausted any potential usefulness as the latter.

He hears the heavy clanging of the door to the stairwell open, and immediately goes back to the doorway to the cell, stepping halfway out. The hallway has stairwells on either end, and Hill brought him down the far one. Bucky's hands are cuffed in front of him, but the tightness in his jaw and shoulders relaxes when he sees Steve.

"See?" Hill says, walking slightly behind Bucky with an impersonal, guiding hand on his arm. "Told you he'd be here."

Bucky glances sideways at her, but doesn't say anything. Steve steps back to let Bucky and Hill into the cell, and clears his throat pointedly when Hill moves back towards the door without taking off Bucky's handcuffs.

Hill looks at Steve, who looks pointedly at the cuffs, and then she rolls her eyes.

"Did you really think I would have the key on me while moving him?" she says. "Maybe next time, boys, but for now, the cuffs stay on."

"You really trust her?" Bucky says as soon as the cell door is closed behind her.

Steve sighs. "I think she's trying to do the right thing, even if she's less concerned about doing it the right way." He looks over at Bucky. "Are you hungry? Thirsty? I have food, although it makes Charlie-rats look like gourmet meals."

Bucky casts a dark look in the direction of the cell door. "Depends," he says, "is it poisoned?"

Steve thinks back to his own lunch, or at least the mercifully little of it that he actually tasted, and says, "Not any more than the Charlie-rats were." He picks the box up from the bed, and Bucky's eyes widen at it.

"What in God's name - ?"

"Welcome to the future," Steve says.

Bucky reluctantly takes the box, and Steve sits down on the bed, his legs hanging off the side. Bucky follows his lead and starts unpacking the food, which has gone soggy - well, soggier - and cool. 

"There's better food than this," Steve says as Bucky begins to eat, reluctantly picking at the French fries. "All kinds, too. It took me a while to get used to sushi, though."

"Jesus Christ, is this made of salt?" Bucky mutters, flicking his fingers together to try to get the salt off.

"More or less," Steve admits. "Apparently they really like salt, these days."

Bucky takes a bite of his cheeseburger, making a face while he chews, and then swallows. "Are we being watched?" he says, very, very quietly.

Steve holds back a sigh, and says, at a normal volume, "Yeah. This room is under surveillance, too."

Bucky shoots him an irritated glance.

"Look, I know how confusing all of this is - "

"Oh, sure you do," Bucky interrupts.

"I do," Steve repeats, "because SHIELD did it to me, too, or tried to. They had a radio playing a Dodgers game from '41 - set up a whole fake New York apartment. I busted out and ended up in the middle of Times Square."

Bucky swallows another bite of cheeseburger. "Guess it changed a little?"

Steve scratches his forehead. "Little things here and there," he says.

"So SHIELD, huh," Bucky says. "Started by Agent Carter herself. She have anything to do with naming it?"

Steve shrugs. "I guess she would have. I never asked."

"That Hill dame said she was still alive."

Steve looks down at the floor. "Yeah. Yeah, she is, but she's...she's sick. It's - they call it Alzheimer's. Her memory's all jumbled up. Sometimes I go in and she's sharp as ever, and sometimes I go in and she doesn't even recognize me."

Bucky lets his hands, still holding the cheeseburger, fall into his lap. "Jesus. I'm sorry," he says, watching Steve. "You - so you go see her?"

"I did, when I was living in DC and working for SHIELD," Steve says. He moves his gaze from the floor to his hands, lightly curled together in his lap. "Things have been kind of complicated the past few weeks."

In his peripheral vision, Steve can see Bucky look away, towards the wall. "Is it the kind of complicated you can tell me about, or is Hill about to pound on the door again?"

Steve closes his eyes for a long blink, and says, "I'm sorry, Buck."

"Yeah," Bucky says, and wraps the few bites of his burger that are left back up in the paper and foil it came in. They sit in silence for a while, until Steve feels Bucky take a deep breath next to him. "The thing is," Bucky says haltingly, "the thing is, I get that you've had more time to get used to all this, but - seventy _years_? I mean, it's a little hard to swallow, you know?"

Steve nods, more to himself than to Bucky. "I know," he says, and he does. If he hadn't lived it, hadn't stumbled out into the sleek cars, flashing lights, and bizarre fashions of the 21st century himself, he probably wouldn't believe it, either. 

"If you were reading this in a pulp, you'd throw it away for being so ridiculous," Bucky continues. "But you're sitting here trying to tell me that it's real - don't you think it's a little - ?"

"A little what?" Steve says, sharper than he meant to, finally looking up to meet Bucky's eyes.

Bucky looks away, his gaze tracing a quick sweep of the room, before his mouth tightens in determination and he looks back at Steve. "How do you know they're not HYDRA?" he says, his voice flat.

"I _know_ ," Steve says. "I can't tell you how - "

"Steve, you're lying to me," Bucky says, his voice half-desperate. "They've got you lying to me, or at least not telling me things, and I can't - I can't for the life of me figure out why the hell you're going along with it!"

"They've all saved my life, every last one of them, and if you would just - "

"How do you know your life was in danger in the first place, huh?" Bucky says. "How do you know they aren't messing with your head, or - you said you thought they were HYDRA at first, right? How do you know you weren't spot-on, and they've been fooling you - "

"Why would HYDRA fake three whole years of my life?" Steve demands. "And for that matter, how'd they manage to fake _Times Square_ , or a giant alien invasion of New York?"

Bucky physically recoils in disbelief. "Did you say alien fucking invasion? When the hell did that happen?"

Steve hesitates. "That wasn't in the file Hill gave you to get you caught up?"

Bucky's worked himself up so much it comes out as a strangled shout. "No! No it wasn't! I think I'd remember a goddamn alien invasion!"

Steve lets his head fall forward into his hands, letting out a resigned breath. "Well, there's not much to tell. Aliens tried to invade. We didn't let them."

"What, you stopped them single-handed?"

Steve winces in preparation for what's coming. "I was working with a team," he says. "Some people from these days - some of them worked for SHIELD, and some were just...independent agents."

After a moment's hesitation, Bucky says, "What kind of team?"

Steve's wince doesn't go away. This probably isn't the best way to convince Bucky that this future is real, but hell if he's going to lie to him – the only thing for it is to give it to Bucky as baldly as possible. "Well, Howard Stark's son has a suit of armor that can fly and shoot energy weapons, although it's not powered by the same thing as HYDRA's. Thor's another alien, a different kind than invaded, but he looks like a big blonde guy with a hammer that can summon lightning. Banner...has some anger issues. Clint and Natasha were just SHIELD agents, although Clint has this bow with all these different kinds of arrows…" Steve risks a glance at Bucky, and despite Bucky's face holding the most dumbfounded expression Steve has ever seen in his life, he feels no desire to laugh. "It sounds really over-the-top when I put it like that," Steve tries.

"Right," Bucky says tonelessly. "So you and that ragtag group of misfits single-handedly defeated an alien invasion of New York."

"I wouldn't say single-handed," Steve protests. "At the very least, there was a nuclear weapon…"

"A what weapon?" Bucky says.

"It's - okay, that definitely has to be in your file, it ended the war on the Pacific front," Steve says.

Bucky leans back across the cot, letting his head rest against the wall behind it. "I get it," he says. "This is some kind of joke, right? I'm in some bizarre field-hospital and you're trying to see how much shit you can feed me before I stop believing."

"Bucky," Steve says. "Please don't - "

"Are the rest of the Commandos watching this somewhere?" Bucky says. "I bet they're having a real good laugh at all this. Alien invasion, Jesus. Was this Morita's - "

"You have no idea what I would give for this to be a prank," Steve says quietly, and that shuts Bucky up immediately. Steve still can't bring himself to meet Bucky's eyes again. "But it's not. It's just - it's just what we're left with."

They both sit in silence for a long minute, until Steve clears his throat and retrieves the folder from where he'd set it on the bed behind him.

"I brought - " he says. "Hill didn't ask if I had this, but I thought you might want to see." He hands the folder to Bucky, who reaches across himself to take it with his right hand.

"What am I looking at?" Bucky asks, reluctantly raising his left hand to steady the folder as he opens it.

"After I woke up, I got in touch with Becca," Steve says. "We've been emailing - that's, uh, like writing letters. She sent me some pictures, said how everyone's doing. I put the emails - the letters - in there, too, because that's where she said who's who…"

Bucky's right hand flips through the pages of the folder's contents. Steve pretends not to notice that it's trembling. Bucky stops at a group picture from the 1990s, taken at someone's birthday celebration before Agnes passed away.

"Jimmy," Bucky reads off the accompanying email. "Is that - is he - "

"Yeah, Buck," Steve says hoarsely. "Agnes named him after you."

Bucky takes a deep breath, and Steve can hear the shake in it. "Jesus," Bucky says. " _Jesus_."

"I know."

"How long ago was this?"

"About twenty years."

Bucky puts the folder down carefully next to him, and rests his right elbow on his knee so he can lean his head against his hand, covering his eyes. "He's gotta be older than I am, now," Bucky says in a very small voice.

Steve thinks of saying, _guess they'll have to start calling you Junior_ , but he can't bring himself to say it. He thinks of saying that it's probably true, even with the years Bucky spent as the Winter Soldier - but of course he can't say that, not unless he wants to potentially trigger some kind of sleeper programming. Instead he says nothing at all.

"This is just - " Bucky says. "This is a lot, Steve."

"I know," Steve says. He almost apologizes, but he knows that once he starts apologizing, he'll never stop.

Bucky takes another deep breath, and when he removes his hand from his eyes, he wipes them quickly. Steve pretends not to see that either.

"I know it's a lot," Steve says, "but you don't have to go this alone. Please – please don't go this alone."

Bucky gives a quick and quiet sniff, and says, "Is that your way of saying I'm stuck with you?"

"I - " Steve says. "If you want me to go - "

"What?" Bucky's head whips around to face Steve. "No, why the hell would you even - "

"I just - whatever you need, Buck," Steve says. "If you need some - some space, or - "

"Shut up," Bucky says, equal parts fond and frustrated. "If I'm stuck with you, then you're stuck with me."

Steve lets his head hang down a bit with relief, and nods. "Okay."

"Hey, where's your shield, anyway?" Bucky says. "With how much Hill's been itching to shoot me - don't gimme that look, Steve, you know she is - I'm surprised she hasn't made you keep it strapped to your back, just in case."

"I," Steve says. "I lost it in my last mission."

Bucky stares at him. "Are you serious?" 

"It's at the bottom of the Potomac River," Steve says, looking away. "It's - it's a long story."

"Was it the aliens?"

"No," Steve says. "But it was worth it."

"Worth losing that shield?" Bucky repeats. "Are you kidding? You love that dumb thing - "

"Absolutely worth it," Steve says.

The door to the cell opens, hard and fast, carrying Hill halfway into the cell with its momentum. "Rogers," she says, sharp and urgent.

Steve looks at Bucky, who halfheartedly throws up his hands. "Secret future stuff, fine, I get it."

"I'll be back," Steve promises, and follows Hill out to the hallway. "What," he says, "did I get too close to spilling some - "

"We found the tech," Hill says. "The HYDRA tech who put Barnes in the chair. We found her."

**v**

Zola likes to talk. Not to Bucky, but just because he likes the sound of his own voice. He chats to the nurses in German, light syllables as he runs the scalpel through injection sites to check the immediate tissue damage. He explains what he does in careful, precise English to Bucky at each step of the way, in terms that would be helpful if Bucky either had any fucking clue what they meant or gave a shit.

Zola says things like "The necrosis that began developing yesterday is now absent," and "There is none of the expected anemia, given how much blood was sampled yesterday." He says it with the same tones and cadences that he speaks to the nurses in, light skipping syllables, as if he's reading off a headline from today's paper because he thinks it might be of minor interest. He says it like he's commenting on the weather.

One day, as the guards are removing the restraints and preparing to take Bucky back to his cell, Zola stops them once they've got him sitting up. (Today wasn't that bad a day, as these things go. They numbed his left arm at the shoulder at the very beginning, and when he looked down and saw that the fingers were twitching like a sleeping dog, bits of skin flayed off to show the muscles jumping and contracting, he still couldn't feel it.) 

"Did you know, Sergeant," Zola says with a small smile, "that as of today, you are the longest surviving subject? You should be proud."

"Go to hell," Bucky says. It's the first complete sentence he's said since he came to the isolation ward, and his voice is creaky and shattered, cutting up his throat as the words emerge. They are still the most satisfying words he can ever remember saying.

"I am an atheist," Zola says. "I don't believe in Hell."

Bucky laughs so hard tears stream from his eyes. Fish probably don't believe in the ocean, either.

On another day, Zola asks, "Do you have any siblings, Sergeant? Any family back home?"

Bucky, on the table, is struggling to breathe. His whole torso shivers even as he tries not to move except to inhale, because it makes the pins-and-needles sensation worse. Inflating and deflating his lungs takes all his effort.

"I do," Zola continues, and sighs. "It is difficult to be parted from them, yes? But what we are doing here is good work. Important work. There will be some who will never understand quite what it is to have a higher calling, and to be part of something that will shape the future." He looks back down at Bucky. "I must say, Sergeant, I did not expect you to last this long. In spite of myself, I am impressed. Together we have discovered more of the territory of human endurance than in all the other subjects combined." Zola pats Bucky's cheek, the way someone would pat a favorite possession. "I am quite curious to find when your luck will break."

He passes out eventually, but to his disappointment, wakes up again.

He can breathe again by the time they take him back to his cell, but taking in so much air makes him lightheaded, and between that and the ever-present exhaustion, the guards have to carry him, the tops of his feet scraping against the ground. They dump him in his cell, and he debates moving himself from the floor to the small cot provided to him.

It would be so easy to give up, to stay on the floor and let Zola use his body for whatever science he wants; to accept that Bucky doesn't really matter anymore, that his flesh is just a conduit for the knowledge Zola obviously wants. He's already said his name, rank, and serial number so many times that they don't even feel like words, don't feel like him, just like noises that he makes to keep from saying anything else. It would be so damn easy to answer the token questions about codes and airbases and troop movements, even if his information is out of date by now. Hell, it probably wouldn't take much to goad one of the guards into just shooting him, already.

But he thinks of his dad, dead in a training accident on-base; his mom and sisters, probably already receiving benefits for his death by now; and Steve, goddamn Steve, who never got knocked down without getting back up. Bucky may know that he's not making it out of this war, and he thinks they could all forgive him that, but giving up without a fight?

So Bucky pulls himself to the damn bed and closes his exhausted eyes. If he ignores the smell, he can almost convince himself he's back in Brooklyn and lying on a cheap bed in a cheap apartment.

And then one day he's on the table and he opens his eyes and there's Steve.

**6**

The recovery op is fast and no-nonsense. Sam stays behind to watch Bucky, and Hill drives herself and Steve to a nearby town in a black SUV. Steve can see the faint ridges where the SHIELD logo has been painted over on the car, and says nothing.

"What do you think, Rogers," Hill says as she gets out onto the residential street where their target lives, "want to be the bad cop for once?"

"Bad cop?" Steve repeats, frowning.

"Yeah. You know, good cop and bad cop. It's where one of us pretends to be nice and protect the subject from the other, who - "

"Oh, you mean Mutt and Jeff," Steve says.

Hill gives him a flat look, then shakes her head. "I'm not going to ask. Do you want to be the bad cop or not?"

"I would love to," Steve says fervently, closing the passenger's side door a little too hard.

They walk right up to the front door, and Hill hits the doorbell. After a few long moments, the door opens, and Steve finds himself staring at a wide-eyed woman with short brown hair and look of deeply panicked regret on her face as she recognizes them.

"Oh, shit," she says, quiet but heartfelt.

"Hi, there," Hill says, practically chirping it. "Would you like to hear about our lord and savior, Nick Fury?"

The technician looks at Steve, and her eyes go wider than Steve would've thought possible. "Are you - ?"

"Yes," Steve says.

"Oh, _shit_ ," says the tech, and puts her shaking hands behind her head. "I surrender."

"Oh, good," says Hill, grabbing one of her arms and hauling her back towards the SUV. Steve follows, trying not to feel robbed of the opportunity to give chase, or maybe punch something.

They take the tech to one of the interrogation rooms. Hill produces another pair of handcuffs, and the tech doesn't argue or struggle as they close over her wrists.

"So," Hill says, dropping a legal pad and a pen onto the table in front of her, "Veronica Finlay, formerly a level-three agent assigned to biomedical technology development. You obviously know who we are, and you definitely know _where_ we are, so why don't you tell us what we want to know and we can get this over with."

Finlay looks from Hill to Steve and back again. She's been quiet this whole time, but she licks her lips and says, "For what it's worth, I never wanted to join HYDRA."

"Really?" Steve says. "Because I think most people who don't want to join HYDRA decide to _not join HYDRA_."

"When HYDRA decides they want you, you say yes or you die," Finlay says, and despite her lack of outward panic, her handcuffs begin to rattle against the metal surface of the table. 

"We're not interested in your life history," Hill says. "What did you do to the Winter Soldier?"

Finlay frowns. "You mean the asset?"

Steve's hands visibly curl into fists where he's leaning on them on the table. "We mean _Bucky_ ," he says. "James Buchanan Barnes, who HYDRA's been using as a _thing_ for the past seventy years."

Finlay's mouth drops open into an 'o' that's half shock and half horror as she stares at Steve. "That was - _he's_ the asset?"

"He was also Captain America's childhood friend and right-hand man," Hill says, "so you might want to stop calling him 'the asset.'"

"I had no idea," Finlay says, beginning to babble. "I swear to god, I had no idea, HYDRA just assigned me to work on - on the project and I know they would've killed me and I thought _he_ was going to kill me - "

"Start at the beginning," Steve snaps. "What did you do to him in that chair?"

"He asked for it!" Finlay wails. "I swear, he just showed up at my house yesterday and said he wanted his memories back and he didn't have a gun but he wouldn't need one, not to kill me - he could kill me with his pinkie toe!"

"And you could do that?" Steve says, his fists tightening. "You had that capability the whole time, to just - bring him back?"

"It's - it's more complicated than that," Finlay says. "The wipes aren't permanent, they're just - the chair we're working with here just blocks certain electrical impulses in the prefrontal cortex and parietal lobe so that those long-term memories can't be accessed, but the blocks break down over time so the asset had to be wiped - "

"Call him by his name," Steve says, and he'd be surprised to hear how much it sounds like a snarl if he cared. "You don't get to act like he's not a person."

Finlay stares at him like she thinks he's about to rip her throat out, and Hill clears her throat softly. They haven't worked together that much, but he gets the message - he's going overboard on the bad cop. The irony is that he wasn't even trying.

"So you broke down the blocks and gave him all of his memories back," Hill says.

"Are you kidding me?" Finlay says, her voice going high. "Of course not! He'd kill me, just like he killed Agent Renfield!"

"Renfield - the agent in charge of this facility?" Hill asks.

"He was HYDRA, too. I didn't - I didn't know what to do after the Triskelion fell and SHIELD didn't exist anymore and I didn't know if they were going to let me go, but two days ago he stopped answering my calls and then the - and then Barnes showed up at my apartment and I just knew that he killed him."

"So if you didn't give him all of his memories back, what _did_ you do?"

Finlay licks her lips. "He - when he was first brought into the project, the first step to developing the wiping and implantation technology was to map his brain, so that when further long-term memory that was potentially mission-relevant was added, they'd know which areas of the brain it was in. Also so they could interface the arm, but that's not relevant." She winces. "That's - I mean, that's also simplified to the point of almost being wrong, but - "

"Close enough," Hill says. "Keep going."

"I just," Finlay says. "I just used that to unblock the memories that he had when he came into the project, and I blocked the other ones. I didn't want him coming after me, okay?"

"Implantation technology," Steve repeats. "Talk about that."

Finlay glances from him to Hill, and clears her throat. "It - well, it's not memories, necessarily, but it's - the neurochemistry is different, but it's...loyalty. Well, technically it's a preprogrammed biochemical reward response timed to coincide with introduction to his handlers for a given mission - "

"In English," Steve says.

Finlay takes a deep breath. "We rigged his brain so he felt good when he saw the people he's supposed to take orders from," she says. "But since - under the circumstances, I didn't do that this time, since there were no handlers."

"You didn't decide to make yourself his handler?" Hill suggests, a dangerous edge to her voice.

"Like I said, I joined HYDRA because they'd kill me if I didn't, not because I actually buy into any of this world-domination bullshit," Finlay snaps. 

"So there's no sleeper programming," Steve says. "No fake memories, nothing that might make him violent or homicidal?"

Finlay shakes her head. "This chair isn't capable of that."

The hairs on the back of Steve's neck prickle. " _This_ chair?" he says very, very quietly.

"It's only a backup for operations in DC," Finlay tells Hill, oblivious to the dents slowly forming in the table below Steve's knuckles. "The one in the city is even more stripped-down - it can only wipe him. The implantation has to be done down here, but having that much tech right by the Triskelion was just - "

"So other chairs could do that," Steve says over her.

Finlay finally looks at him and blanches. "I - yes, but they're not - not around here. Those operations were kept off US soil. But in Russia, in Project Red Room - yes."

"Would the wipe that you did to him erase any potential sleeper triggers?" Hill asks, saying each word with careful neutrality.

"No," Finlay says. "That's a neurologically conditioned response, not memory. This chair just - it doesn't have the technology. Unless you want to take him to Russia, the only way to know if he has any waiting to be tripped is to trip one - unless you can get your hands on the records, but those were kept offshore, too."

"In Kiev?" Steve asks sharply.

"Sure? Maybe?" Finlay says. "I'm not a geographer."

"You said the blocks wear down - the wipes wear off?" Hill says.

"There were incidents," Finlay says. "When he went off the grid. I only heard about them, but he can't stay out of cryo for too long or his behavior becomes...erratic."

"Does that extend to mental conditioning?" Hill presses. "Is he going to start reverting to the Winter Soldier as he starts to remember?"

Finlay gives an exaggerated, almost pained shrug. "That's the opposite problem we've usually had. It's never happened."

"Right. Can you think," Hill says, delicately and dangerously articulating each syllable, "of any compelling reason why we should believe anything you're saying?"

"Um," Finlay says, "well, I - I'd really like to get out from HYDRA's thumb, even if it's to, you know, jail." She glances over at Steve, and then puts her eyes firmly back on Hill and adds, "Also Captain America looks really scary and judgey right now."

Hill looks over at Steve, then down at where his hands meet the table.

"Then maybe you should sit here for a while and think about your life choices," Hill says, standing up. She slides the legal pad and pen over to Finlay's side of the table. "And while you're at it, maybe write down every last thing you know about how that chair works. Let me know if you need more paper."

Steve can tell based on her body language that she wants him to follow her, but first he leans over the table, in towards Finlay.

"I want you to know - to really understand - what you did to that _asset_ ," he says, spitting the last word. "You took a good man and you made him nothing. You erased him. You turned him into a _thing_ because you didn't want to get hurt yourself. You know what the kicker is? After all this, the man I know might still have had mercy on you. _You_ turned him into something that wouldn't."

"I - " Finlay says, her hands shaking again. "I was just doing what they told me…"

"You're talking to someone who literally liberated concentration camps during the Holocaust," Hill says. "I don't think that excuse is going to fly."

"The next time somebody puts your back up against a wall and tries to get you to do the wrong thing," Steve says, " _choose better_."

He stalks out of the interrogation room, not watching to see if Hill follows him, and punches the opposite wall so hard a spiderweb of cracks appears in the concrete.

The skin over his knuckles won't stay split for more than a few hours, he knows, but he almost feels a little better, so it's almost worth it. He hears the door click shut behind him.

"Okay, so you're never playing bad cop again," Hill says from behind him.

"I have his file from Kiev," Steve says, instead of answering her.

"Let me guess - Romanoff?" 

Steve turns around. "She translated it, too, but I was looking for names and locations, anywhere he might go, when I read it. I wasn't looking at the technical details."

"Well, then," Hill says, "let's see if HYDRA left us any surprises."

They reconvene in the briefing room, its display set to show Bucky's cell, Sam joining Steve and Hill with the file.

"Looks like the protocol was to remove triggers after each mission," Sam says. "I took a look while I was walking it up. Since the last mission would've been out of DC - "

"He's clean," Hill says, watching the display thoughtfully. On it, Bucky lays on the cot, his arms folded behind his head, and though the volume is turned down, Steve can hear him whistling "Let's Misbehave," although barely. "At least, until he starts remembering the Winter Soldier."

"If it's not going to trigger him, then we should just _tell_ him," Steve says.

"You just don't like lying to him," Hill accuses.

"No, I don't, and I don't see why that's a bad thing!"

"If we tell him what's coming, he might be able to keep a lid on it," Sam says. "But that only works if he knows it's coming. Trigger or no trigger."

"And what happens if he remembers that the last mission he had was to murder you?" Hill demands. "I'm not going to send you in there - "

"No, you're not," Sam interrupts. "I'll tell him."

"Sure, let's have the guy who has the least combat training and who was _also_ one of his last targets do it," Hill says. "That's a great idea."

"You've got that sedative thing in his arm," Sam says, watching her evenly. "And I may have the least combat training, but I've sure as hell got more training than either you or Steve when it comes to dealing with vets. Besides, he might be less likely to assume I'm HYDRA."

"What, are you saying there's something about me that screams 'Nazi'?" Hill says, eyebrows raised.

"Yeah, because my charm and winning personality are the only things that would keep me out of a white supremacist organization," Sam says, and makes a sweeping gesture with one hand to indicate his body.

Hill winces, called out, and then inclines her head. "All right, fair enough, but I still don't think we should tell him yet."

"Okay," Steve says. "So when? If not now, when are you going to tell him? Or are you just going to leave him here to rot because he might, maybe, one day be a threat?"

"We have to think about the people he could hurt," Hill says. "And I'm not just talking about us and Fury - I'm talking about the people that HYDRA could turn him on, or, hell, the ones he could just up and decide by himself to hurt."

"Will you ever be convinced that he might not want to kill anyone anymore? Or are we looking at leaving him in here forever?"

Hill sighs. "Sometimes we have to do the wrong thing for the right reasons, Cap."

"Not to innocent people."

"Just because he's innocent doesn't mean he's not dangerous."

"And just because he's dangerous doesn't mean he'll put people in danger."

Sam looks between Steve and Hill, and flips the file shut. "Okay, folks, let's take this one step at a time. Step one either way is telling Barnes. It's just a matter of whether we do it now or later, and personally, I'm putting in my vote for now."

"So am I," Steve says, not looking away from Hill.

Hill doesn't look away either, her jaw set off to the side as she considers. Then she says, "Fine. But I'm watching, and the second it looks like it's going south, he's getting the elephant tranquilizer."

**iv**

"Holy shit, Steve," Bucky says when they reach the clearing, "you didn't say you brought friends."

"Hey, Captain America!" Bucky and Steve both turn to look and Gabe Jones waves at them enthusiastically from a - Jesus Christ, it's definitely a HYDRA tank. "Look what I found!"

"Oh," says Steve faintly, and Bucky busts out laughing, so hard that he reaches for Steve's shoulder about a foot too low and ends up practically hanging off Steve's ammo belt to keep himself on his feet. 

"Bucky?" Steve says, putting a hand between Bucky's shoulder blades and sounding so very concerned that it just makes Bucky laugh harder.

"Well, son of a bitch," says another voice, and Bucky finds himself hauled upright by Dum Dum. "Shoulda known you were alive. Shit, you look like death warmed up."

"Yeah, but give me a couple days' rest and I'll look fine and you'll still be ugly," says Bucky, trying not to sound as loopy as he feels, and claps Dum Dum on the shoulder, only partially to steady himself. He glances over at Steve, who's digging through his pockets. "Lose something, Steve?"

" _Steve_?" Dum Dum repeats incredulously. "Captain America's name is _Steve_? Wait, is this the Steve that - "

"Oh," says Steve again, holding up what would have been a radio if it weren't for the missing chunk. "I," Steve says, sounding almost embarrassed. "Maybe I should've kept this in a different pocket."

"How many miles behind enemy lines are we?" Dum Dum asks, and Steve grimaces at him.

"We should probably start walking, if we can," he says, and looks around. "Who's the ranking officer?"

Dum Dum looks at Bucky. "You never said he was dumb."

"Pretty sure it's you, pal," Bucky tells Steve, and tries to ignore that Dum Dum is taking more and more of his weight the longer they stand. "Congratulations on the promotion."

Steve gives Bucky an adorably incredulous look, eyebrows high and disbelieving. "I," he says again. "Okay. I can - all right." He takes a breath and then pulls something else from his pocket - a compass. He consults it briefly, then looks over to his left. Bucky can practically see the calculation in his eye, the same way he'd take the first look at a model in their art classes - quick assessment, deciding what to tackle first and get the lay of the land. "Has anyone looked at the injured, or counted how many we have?"

Dum Dum shakes his head. "Asked around while we were waiting - no medics left. Don't know how many we've got, either, but anyone who's not hurt should be able to walk. They had to keep us in good enough condition to work."

Bucky thinks of Freddy and MacFarlane and even Ingrams, and his stomach gives a halfhearted turn - if it weren't empty, he might've puked then and there.

"Buck? You okay?"

Bucky snaps his attention back to Steve, and says, "The sooner we get the hell out of here, the better I'll be."

Steve nods, decisively. "Then we'll move." He steps into the middle of the clearing, and in a voice louder and stronger than Bucky had ever heard from him, shouts, "Everyone listen up! We're going southeast, which is over that way! If you're injured and can't walk, find someone to help you into one of the trucks or tanks. This isn't going to be easy or pretty, but if we all just stay calm, we'll get out of this and back to camp, where I have it on good authority there are some USO showgirls who would love to shake each and every one of your hands."

Someone gives a halfhearted whoop, and someone else yells, "Are you really Captain America?"

"Uh," says Steve. "Yes, I am."

"Why the hell should we listen to you?" someone else says, too loud to be a mumble but not quite loud enough to be a shout.

Bucky pushes himself away from Dum Dum and takes in as much air as he can to yell back, "He just saved all of our sorry asses, is why - if you don't want to follow him, pick a direction and start walking, but me, I'd like to make it out of this war alive!"

"Bucky," Steve says, quietly but disapproving.

Bucky shrugs back at him, unrepentant. "Southeast, right?"

The men aren't milling around anymore, but have started checking each other for injuries and congregating around the trucks and tanks. 

"C'mon, Bucky," Dum Dum says, taking Bucky gently by the arm. "How about the tank, with Gabe?"

"Like hell," Bucky snaps, pulling his arm away. "I'm walking."

Steve frowns, a mixture of displeasure and concern, then looks at Dum Dum. "I'm sorry - I didn't catch your name."

Dum Dum doffs his bowler. "Call me Dum Dum, Cap. Dum Dum Dugan."

Steve blinks, but says, "Dum Dum. Thanks. Could you give us a second?"

Bucky begins before Dum Dum's even out of earshot, vaguely aware that without someone to lean on, he's swaying slightly. "You're not sticking me in some tin-can Nazi tank - "

Steve puts his hands on both Bucky's shoulders. "Buck, you can barely stand up straight. How long were you even in that isolation ward?"

"Long enough to enjoy some goddamn fresh air," Bucky retorts. 

"Well, I didn't go AWOL and come all this way to rescue you just for you to walk yourself to death."

Bucky has to stare at him for a second before it sinks in. " _AWOL_?"

Steve makes this little reluctant face, the same one he'd made before jumping across a goddamn pit of explosions. "I was gonna cross that bridge when I came to it."

Bucky scrubs his face with his hand. "How did you even get here, then?"

"Peggy - Agent Carter - and Howard Stark flew me," Steve says.

"A year," Bucky says. "I'm gone for a _year_ and you're Captain America gone AWOL with Agent Dame and Howard friggin' Stark. How long did it even take you to get caught up in all this Cap business?"

Steve winces. "It was - right before you shipped out."

"I hadn't even _left_?" Bucky wails, and Steve tightens his grip on his shoulders.

"It was secret! I couldn't tell anyone, they made me swear," Steve says, and Bucky doesn't have the heart to tell him that's not his point, just scrubs his face with his hand again. Steve is, once again, instantly attentive. "You okay?"

Bucky almost laughs again, but it seemed to scare Steve last time. Instead, between the lightheadedness and the exhaustion, he admits, "I'm not completely sure this isn't some crazy dream and I'm gonna wake up and be back in that factory." He takes a deep breath, and meets Steve's eyes. "So if you think I'm letting you out of my sight for a single second, you're out of your goddamned mind."

Steve's hands tighten on his shoulders again, but he just nods. "How about a truck, then?" he says. "You can sit in the cab. It won't be the most comfortable, but you'll be able to see." Bucky hesitates, and Steve adds, "Please?"

Bucky sighs. "Damn dirty trick, Rogers."

Steve just smiles. "Which truck do you want?"

He ends up in a truck driven by a guy captured from another unit, who introduces himself as Jim Morita. By the time Steve's helped him up into the cab, Bucky's too exhausted to say much more than "hey" and lean his head against the door.

"You Sergeant Barnes?" Morita asks, turning the engine over. "The one in the fight?"

"Been in lots of fights," Bucky says, trying to keep his eyes open.

"You gave those guards what-for," Morita says, his voice shaded with respect.

"Yeah, I try," Bucky mumbles, and when he opens his eyes again the sun's out and bright enough that it must've been hours, and he can see Steve walking up ahead, Dum Dum on one side and Gabe on the other, and if it can't be Bucky there at least it's them. Bucky closes his eyes again.

He wakes up to fingers against his neck and he's got his hand around a wrist before he's even fully awake, ready to twist it to breaking if that's what it takes to keep their goddamn stinking Nazi hands off him -

And then his eyes focus and it's Steve, fingers pulled as far away from Bucky's neck as they can go with Bucky still holding his wrist and his eyes wide and cautious.

"It's okay, Buck, it's just me," Steve says, but he looks wrong, taller and bigger -

"Jesus," Bucky says as he remembers, and he lets go. "Jesus, Steve, don't - "

"My fault," says Steve, letting his wrist rest against the door instead of pulling it all the way out. "I should've known better. You'd just been sleeping so long, I wanted to make sure…"

Pulse. He was checking for a pulse. Bucky puts his hands against his face, trying to rub the sleep out of his eyes, as if it'll do anything about the strange mix of exhaustion and adrenaline he's caught up in. 

"Give me some credit. It'll take a lot more than a car ride to do me in. A train, at the very least," he says, and looks around. "We stopped?"

"For lunch," Steve says. "There were some supplies in the trucks, and enough guns that some of the guys went hunting." He looks Bucky over, his expression going tight. "I wish there were a medic to look you over."

"Yeah, well, there isn't," says Bucky, and doesn't realize until after he's said it how bitter and brittle it sounds. "'Sides, even if there was," he says, and manages to sound closer to normal, "not like there's a lot they'd be able to do out here."

"We can at least wash out the cuts," Steve says firmly, and opens the cab door. "Come on."

Bucky's a lot steadier coming out of the truck than he was going in, and other than stomach-twisting hunger and an almost flu-like general ache, he feels surprisingly okay as he follows Steve around to the back of the truck. Okay, but - different.

Bucky's folks took him and his sisters down to the shore once, and he'd been caught up in the Atlantic swells and tipped ass-over-teakettle before he even knew what was happening. When the ocean finally spat him out on the shore, coughing and trembling, he'd felt like a different person entirely than had gone into the water, as though the sand in the water had peeled away every inch of him from his toenails to the inside of his lungs, and left someone else behind.

He tries not to think about that.

They're in a field, some men milling around and others making fires - no sign of Morita, Dum Dum, or Gabe. Dernier's the only other one from the factory that he really knew, inasmuch as anyone knows what the hell he's saying since he's never said a damn word of English, but Bucky hasn't seen him since he got put in isolation. He can't imagine that Dum Dum wouldn't have said something if Dernier was dead, but Dum Dum didn't say anything else about the rest of the unit and Bucky doesn't see any of them. He wonders how many made it out of the factory, given how few of them had gone in.

At the back of the truck, Steve's got a HYDRA helmet overturned and filled with water, a patch of cloth the color of a HYDRA uniform, and an honest-to-god sliver of soap.

"Where'd you find that?" Bucky demands.

"Under one of the seats," Steve says. "Think someone dropped it. Their loss." 

Bucky strips his shirt off in slow, stiff motions. His arms almost get caught over his head as he tries to reach the shoulder of his sweater to pull it up, but eventually the muscles stretch enough to let him get the damn thing off. 

"Jesus, Bucky," Steve says quietly. "Dum Dum wasn't kidding - you really do look like death warmed up."

Bucky looks down at himself. There are fading bruises where the restraints pulled him down as he thrashed against them, fading criss-cross lines of scars where his skin was split open, and the patchwork and dots of bruises and punctures from the injections. He looks terrible, he really does, but it doesn't make any damn _sense_ \- he shouldn't look like death warmed up, he should still look like death served cold -

"Yeah," he says, his voice strangled. "Guess I've been better."

Steve's watching him, his face kind of slack and pained at the same time, and Bucky knows he's about to ask, about to try to get the details, and just the thought of trying to fit words to it makes Bucky's heart pound hard in his chest and his breath come quicker.

So instead he says, "Doesn't feel any worse than the hangover the first time we got drunk."

And Steve, God bless Steve, tightens his jaw and gives a half-nod like he knows exactly what Bucky's doing and he's going along with it, and says, "At least Prohibition's over and we don't have to worry about going blind from moonshine."

"Or raids," Bucky agrees, and lets Steve carefully touch the soapy wet rag to the ragged inside of his arm. It feels so much like when they'd clean each other up after fights back in Brooklyn that Bucky almost starts believing in home again.

 

**5**

Hill insists on moving Bucky back to the interrogation room. She says it's because the table is useful for showing him pictures, but Steve watches through the glass as she clips Bucky's handcuffs back to the table, which is itself bolted down, and knows that isn't the reason.

"Hey," Sam says, closing the interrogation room door behind him. "Sorry for all this, man. I'm Sam Wilson."

Bucky eyes Sam. "You from SHIELD too?"

"Nope," Sam says, sitting down across from Bucky and laying the file down in front of him. "I'm with the VA - Bureau of Veterans Affairs. Although I guess it was still the Veterans Administration back in your day."

Bucky frowns. "So, what, you're here to talk to me about my pension?"

"Not exactly. I'm not here representing the VA - I'm here because I offered to help Steve with something, a little while back, and I've been working with him ever since."

"Working with him?" Bucky repeats, the frown deepening.

"It's complicated. I'm here as his friend." Sam pauses, and then shrugs. "I guess you could say for the past couple of weeks, I've been his wingman."

"I cannot _believe_ it," Hill says, each syllable crisp. "Please tell me he didn't just say that."

Steve just shakes his head, his eyes on Bucky. "He's said it about twenty times in the past seven weeks."

"You've pretty definitely noticed by now that there are some things that Steve and Agent Hill have been talking around," Sam continues. "I'm here to fill in that gap. Under the circumstances, I volunteered to be the one to tell you. Steve wanted to tell you himself - I think he wants you to know that."

"Yeah? Then why isn't he here?"

"He is," Sam says, and turns to point at the two-way mirror. "He's observing up there, with Agent Hill. If you want him gone at any point, say the word."

"What?" Steve mutters. "I never agreed to - "

"Hill has to stay," Sam says apologetically. "But since she doesn't like you very much, we figured it was probably the best idea if she wasn't the one having this conversation with you."

"And why isn't Steve having it?"

"Because," Sam says, "Steve cares about you a lot, and he really, _really_ wants you to be okay. What I'm about to tell you? Very little of it is okay. Steve would pull his punches, and that's not fair to you. I think what you deserve right now is just the truth, even if it's not a happy truth."

Bucky's mouth tugs up on one side in a familiar, unhappy smirk. "Less happy than being told I spent seventy years sleeping in the ice in a godforsaken ravine in Italy?"

Sam says, his voice sober, "Yes. Because you weren't sleeping. At least, not for all of it." 

The smirk slowly disappears from Bucky's face, fading into wary confusion.

"HYDRA found you in Italy," Sam continues. "Just after you fell, in 1945. They saved your life, but they couldn't save your arm. You were still too much for them to handle, and they put you in cryofreeze - a kind of suspended animation - until 1954, when they delivered the cryofreeze pod to Arnim Zola, who'd been granted leniency in exchange for working for the US. Nobody knew that he was restarting HYDRA within SHIELD. He used those nine years and HYDRA and SHIELD resources, made that metal arm, and developed technology that allowed him to erase your memories and control you. He had you working as an assassin for HYDRA, wiping your memory after each mission and keeping you in cryofreeze when you weren't actively working." He pauses. "How're you doing so far?"

Steve can see Bucky swallow; he's gone tense, wound tight, and he snaps, "Bullshit."

"Fair enough," Sam says evenly, and opens up the file. Steve can see the picture of Bucky in cryofreeze, the blue-ice cast to his face recognizable even from here, sitting on top. Sam slides it across the table towards Bucky, just as Hill had done with the picture of Steve when he was frozen. "We don't have a whole lot of documentation - it looks like HYDRA tried to keep a lot of what it did off the books, in case someone on the legitimate side of SHIELD started looking into it - but we've got this."

He flips through a couple of pages - Russian, Steve realizes, this must be the file from Kiev - and takes out another picture.

"A security camera caught this picture while you were working an op in DC more recently," Sam says. From here, Steve can't see the picture, and he wishes he had thought to ask before Sam went in - he thinks he sees gray concrete, but in DC that doesn't narrow it down by much, and it could just as easily be the bridge or the first attempt on Fury's life -

Bucky looks from the picture to the star on his left arm and back to the picture.

"That's not - " he says. "That doesn't prove anything."

"The target of the DC op was Nick Fury, the Director of SHIELD," Sam says. "HYDRA had been planning to use SHIELD's new flying weapons platform to take out its own enemies instead, and Fury got too close. Only when Fury was taken down, Steve got involved, too. He picked up where Fury left off and followed the breadcrumbs until he figured out what the plan was, and then he led a couple of us on a mission to take down the Helicarriers - the weapons platform - before HYDRA could finish off their plan. We also made all their files public, which brought down HYDRA, but also brought down SHIELD in the process."

Bucky swallows again, and when he speaks again, his voice has just the slightest tremor to it. "What does this have to do with me?"

"Alexander Pierce, a member of the World Security Council and a high-ranking member of SHIELD, was also the head of HYDRA and the plan to repurpose the Helicarriers. He sent you to try to stop us."

Steve keeps his eyes on Bucky, who's gone very, very still, his eyes on the picture in front of him.

"Obviously you were unsuccessful," Sam continues. "The Helicarrier that you and Steve were on crashed into the Potomac River, but both of you survived. Steve thinks you saved him - swam him to shore."

Bucky says, "He thinks?"

"He was unconscious," Sam says gently. "He was injured in the mission, and then fell from the Helicarrier to the river."

"He was injured," Bucky repeats. "You mean - you mean I hurt him."

Sam says, "Yes."

In the observation room, Steve closes his eyes, just for a moment, and opens them again. He'd been hoping this wouldn't come up.

One corner of Bucky's mouth twitches, as if pained, and he says, "How bad?"

"Four gunshot wounds," Sam says, in that same even tone he's been using this whole time. "Two were grazes, to the hand and chest. One bullet was recovered from his thigh, and another was a through-and-through to his lower abdomen."

Bucky's jaw sets, even though Steve can see the brightness of his eyes from here. "You're trying to tell me I shot Steve."

"Yes," Sam says. 

Bucky leans back in his seat as far as the handcuffs on the table will let him. "I don't believe you."

"It's not your fault," Sam says. "What HYDRA did to you - "

"I think I'd remember if I shot Steve," Bucky snaps. "Or did HYDRA wipe my memories again after you brought them down?"

"No," Sam says. "Not HYDRA. You were off the grid for about six weeks after the Helicarriers came down, and then you appeared at the home of a technician who worked for HYDRA near here. According to her, you demanded that she restore your memories of being Bucky Barnes. In the process, she blocked all your memories since then."

Bucky looks up at the ceiling, shaking his head slightly. "That's such a crock of shit."

"Until recently, we weren't sure if HYDRA had left any subconscious triggers or missions," Sam continues, as if Bucky hadn't said anything. "That's why we couldn't tell you anything. We weren't sure if you were really you, or if you were potentially a threat to yourself, to us, or to others."

"And I'm sure now you're just gonna let me out, right?" Bucky says to the ceiling. "You're just gonna let me go?"

"We're concerned that if your memories of HYDRA's missions come back, they might take over," Sam says. "And since your last mission was to kill us…" Sam shrugs. "I hope you can understand that we're planning on playing it safe."

Bucky looks down from the ceiling to Sam. "Wait, so - so Steve actually believes this?"

"He was there for it," Sam says steadily, "so yeah, he remembers it happening."

"You just told me that HYDRA could mess with memories," Bucky says, "so you'll excuse me if that's not exactly putting all my doubts to rest."

"I'm so glad we decided to tell him," Hill says to Steve. "Really, I can see how this is making everything so much easier for us."

Steve just closes his eyes again. "This isn't how I was hoping it would go," he says.

"Can't imagine why not," Hill says.

Sam steps into the observation room a few minutes later, leaving a furiously-glaring Bucky with the file.

"I tried, man," Sam says.

"I know," Steve says. "I do, and - thanks. I appreciate it."

"He's damn stubborn," Sam adds, looking through the glass and shaking his head at Bucky. "I thought you were the most stubborn person I knew, but…"

"Makes you wonder," Hill says, and both Sam and Steve turn to look at her. "Makes you wonder what it took to break him," she clarifies, and Steve has to remind himself to breathe.

"What are you saying?" Sam asks.

Hill releases a long breath, looking through the glass. "I'm saying, I don't think the right thing to do is as clear-cut as we might wish it were. Steve, did you really think that once he knew everything he'd just be okay? Even though he was brainwashed and used as an assassin for decades by the same people he spent so long fighting?"

"Are you arguing we should recruit him, or kill him?" Sam says. "Because it could go either way, given what you're saying."

"I'm saying that we don't have SHIELD's resources to throw at this particular problem anymore," Hill says. "Maybe you haven't noticed, but it's just the three of us and him in this bunker, and you're right, Steve, we can't keep him here forever. That raises the question of what the hell we do with him."

"That's not answering my question," Sam says.

"I don't have an answer," Hill says. "I really don't. Maybe Stark could - "

"I can take care of him," Steve says.

"It sounds like he's still pretty convinced that you're the one who's been brainwashed, in case you hadn't noticed," Hill says, shaking her head. "I'm not letting him out until I know he's not going to kill anyone he happens to think is a HYDRA agent."

"Especially since you're right at the top of that list," Sam mutters.

"Yeah, well, sounds like you're number two, so," Hill tells him.

"I'll talk to him," Steve says. "I can convince him."

"And if you can't?" Hill says.

"I will," Steve says.

Hill blinks first. "Fine. Are you going to convince him before or after dinner?"

Steve glances at his watch and grimaces. It seems almost impossible that all this could've happened so quickly – that it hasn't been even twenty-four hours since they got the call. "I'll - I'll take him dinner."

"We'll need to get dinner first," Sam says. 

"You two go," Hill says. "I'll get him back to his cell."

"Alone?" Sam says.

Hill once again holds up the activator switch for the sedative. "If he tries anything, I'll knock him out and drag his ass back there," she says. "It'll be cathartic. That was a joke, Steve," she adds. Steve remains unconvinced.

Sam takes them to a fast-food restaurant off the highway that he insists is better than McDonald's, and Steve gets enough for himself and his metabolism as well as Bucky.

"You sure you wanna do this?" Sam says as they get out of the car.

"I'm sure I have to," Steve says, and Sam puts both paper bags of food in one hand so he can clap Steve on the shoulder.

"Well, good luck, man. You know what they say - BOHICA."

Steve musters up a smile for that. "They still say that?"

"Oh, yeah. Reilly and I called it the second-deployment salute."

Steve goes with Sam to the observation room first, to give Hill her food. Bucky is already in his cell, sitting on his cot with an angry and sullen gaze fixed on one particular patch of wall that must've done something to offend him. 

"You going to watch this, too?" Steve asks, passing Hill her bag of food.

"You're damn right," Hill says.

Steve goes in anyway. Bucky's expression doesn't change when Steve enters, although his eyes go straight to the food.

"Sam said this would be better than the last one," Steve says, holding out the bag.

"Sam," Bucky repeats, but takes it. "So the two of you are on a first-name basis?"

Steve sits down on the cot next to him, his own bag of food in his lap. "Seems like everyone's on a first-name basis with everyone these days," he says. "First time I called someone ma'am, she got offended. Said I was making her feel old."

"You always had a special touch with the dames," Bucky says.

"Nobody - nobody really says 'dame' anymore," Steve says, wincing slightly. "And actually, there's - I should make you a list of things that, uh, mean different things now, and what they say instead."

"Six weeks, huh?" Bucky says.

"What?"

" _Sam_ ," and Steve can hear the doubt dripping off the name, "said it'd been six weeks since everything went down with HYDRA and SHIELD. What've you been doing that whole time?"

Steve keeps his eyes on his food. "I was looking for you," he tells the food. "There were - there were some Russian scientists who came over to the US with HYDRA. We thought you might be going after them. Obviously we were wrong - we were really wrong, we were in Philadelphia, for Christ's sake - but we were...we were looking."

"We?"

"Sam came with me," Steve says.

"Right." Bucky moves in the corner of Steve's vision, and the motions are so familiar he can fill them in from memory - the way he turns and tilts his head, the angry not-smile. "The Liberty Bell still there?"

"We weren't there for the Liberty Bell, Buck," Steve says.

"No, course not," Bucky says. "You were there looking for me, because I was on the run after I shot you. I have to say, I'm pretty offended that you buy that. You think it'd take me four shots? I was a friggin' sniper - "

"I don't think you were trying all that hard," Steve says quietly. "And you didn't have a rifle, just a pistol. And a knife." And that metal arm, against Steve's face over and over again - 

"He didn't mention a knife," Bucky says.

"It," Steve says. "There was - it was a fight and then I fell a couple hundred feet into the water. There was a whole laundry list of what was wrong with me at the hospital, just like the old days. Guess the knife got lost in the shuffle."

"And I guess six weeks is long enough that there aren't any scars," Bucky says, and there's that edge again, testing Steve's limits. But now Steve doesn't even have the energy to get riled up.

"Most of them are gone," he says, keeping his voice neutral.

Bucky catches it anyway. "Only most?"

Steve finally looks at Bucky. "Buck, do you really - are you sure - "

"Stop waffling and just show it to me," Bucky says, and Steve sighs, putting aside his food. He carefully lifts the hem of his t-shirt until it reveals the exit wound on his stomach, just below his sternum. Even from a pistol, it had been messy, and though the other scars have all faded, this one is a faint silver mass of swirls and ridges of scar tissue. It'll be gone within a few weeks, but exit wounds are always worse than entry wounds, and this one is no exception.

Bucky sucks in a breath when he sees it. "Jesus, Steve," he says.

"It wasn't your fault," Steve says, pulling his shirt back down. "It may have been you, but it wasn't your fault, it was HYDRA, and you saved me. You pulled me out of the river when I couldn't swim - "

"Because I shot you," Bucky says, and now he almost sounds hysterical. "Jesus _Christ_ , Steve, you're trying to tell me that I - "

"It wasn't your fault," Steve repeats.

"Right, it was HYDRA's fault, because they kept wiping my memory and using me to kill people, because that's _so much_ better," Bucky says, sweeping the paper wrappings of his meal off his lap and standing up to pace the cell, or at least what there is of it. "Do you even hear yourself? This is completely nuts!"

"I know," Steve says miserably. "But it's the truth - " Bucky glares at him, and Steve throws his hands up. "Unless you have a better explanation!"

Bucky looks away, scanning the room, and Steve can pinpoint the exact moment that he decides what he's about to do is a terrible decision and he's going to do it anyway.

"How do you know it isn't HYDRA?"

Steve groans, letting his head fall back.

"Maybe this is what they're trying to do," Bucky continues, "stop us from trusting each other. It's a hell of a lot more plausible than this bullshit about the _future_ and _alien invasions_ \- "

"Why would they do that?" Steve says. "Why would they do any of that? I'm not even working for Sam or Hill - "

"They're HYDRA!" Bucky says, and he's almost screaming now. "They'd do it just to see if they could! Just to see if they could break you, just to find out what it would take! That's what they _do_ , Steve, they strap you down and take you apart until you're nothing but data, nothing but his _science_!" He spits the last word, vicious and wounded, and the pieces click into place. Steve's throat gets tight, but he can't look away from Bucky now, even though Bucky's just standing in the middle of the cell, breathing hard and trembling.

Steve finally looks away, down at his hands, and he knows what he's about to say is inadequate even as he says it. "They're not HYDRA. I trust them."

"Yeah," Bucky says, deflated and accusing at the same time. "More than you trust me, apparently."

Steve stands up, his own food falling off his lap to the floor. "What? No - "

"Seeing as you've been leaving the room every time that they call," Bucky says, "and shutting up every time they hit the glass and letting them stick me in a room with handcuffs and interrogate me - "

"We're just trying to keep you from doing something you'd regret," Steve says, taking a step forward. "Bucky, you don't - "

"Something I'd regret, like what? Like escaping?" 

"Like actually killing me!" Steve yells.

"How the _hell_ could you think, even for a second, that I would ever do that?" Bucky shouts back. 

"Because you did! You tried!"

Bucky lets out a wordless, strangled yell of frustration, turning away, and Steve makes the mistake of reaching out to put a hand on his shoulder.

Bucky spins fast and reflexive, and his fist hits Steve's jaw in what is without a doubt the weakest pulled punch Steve has ever felt in his life - it doesn't so much hit as it _nudges_ his face, but even though it's the flesh-and-blood hand, instinct takes over from the bridge, from the Helicarrier, the sparking urge to _survive, survive, survive for the both of you, don't let him do anything stupid_ running through him and Steve's hand is on the inside of Bucky's arm and he's curling into a throw - 

But Bucky has instincts, too, and he rolls back onto his feet just before he hits the wall, kicking off of it to come at Steve in a full-body tackle. Steve impacts the wall with a low _oomph_ and he's got his leg ready to trip Bucky up but suddenly Bucky doesn't seem to need any help with that because he's staggering backward, his eyes wide with confusion and horror and for a heartstopping second Steve thinks that he might've been fighting the Winter Soldier and not a provoked Bucky after all, that this is Bucky waking up from being triggered - 

And then Bucky lurches sideways, his eyes unfocused, and Steve rushes forward to catch him, getting his arms under Bucky's shoulders and easing him to the floor as best he can. Bucky's head lolls against Steve's chest, and one of his hands grips Steve's sleeve in a weak and uncoordinated fist.

"No - no no no - " Bucky slurs, and the door to the cell bursts open.

"Steve, you okay?" Hill demands, the sedative activator in one hand and a gun in the other. Sam is right behind her.

"Bucky - " Steve mutters, but Bucky's eyes are closed. He looks up at Hill and Sam. "Is he - "

Sam steps around Hill and places two fingers to Bucky's neck. "If the dosing was right, he should be fine," Sam says, frowning in concentration at the middle distance as he counts the beats. Then he pulls his hand back. "His pulse is normal."

For a moment, holding Bucky's unconscious body, Steve feels completely unmoored - it happened so fast, and he can't blame Hill but he hates where it ended up and he maybe blames Hill a little bit, and he feels, weirdly, like his friend's just been taken from him yet again.

"Help me get him on the bed," Steve says, his voice raspy, and Sam reaches under and takes Bucky's other shoulder and they lay him on the cot.

Bucky's face is slack and empty as Steve eases his head onto the pillow, and he stares helplessly at Bucky until Sam puts a hand on his shoulder.

"I should've known better than to grab him," Steve says. "My fault."

"He threw the first punch," Hill says, holstering her gun. "We don't have another subcutaneous sedative, though. We'll have to come up with another way to deal with him if he keeps - "

Steve doesn't say anything, just walks past her to the hallway outside and punches the wall three times in rapid succession.

"Keep that up and you're gonna bring the whole place down around our ears," Sam says.

Steve rests his forehead against the wall, in the indentations he left, and takes a slow breath. Then he turns back towards the doorway. "How long is he going to be out?"

"A regular person would be out for twelve hours," Hill says. "But him? No clue." She holds the door open for Sam to precede her out, and then closes the cell door behind her. "I think this is as good a time as any to take a little break, get some rest."

"And some food," Sam says, holding out the fast-food bag to Steve. "Grabbed this for you."

Steve takes it with a muttered "thanks."

"I'm going to use this opportunity to take a nap," Hill tells them. "You should, too. You look like you could use it."

"You need some ice for that jaw?" Sam says. "Maybe that kitchen'll have some."

"He pulled his punch," Steve says, and the paper in his hand crinkles under his fingers. "I barely felt it. He just - he didn't like to be touched without warning, after Zola. I'd forgotten that."

"It's been three years for you," Sam reminds him. "You're allowed to forget stuff."

"Yeah," Steve says, and swallows hard. "Sure."

**iii**

It's a bar back in London, and even with the air raids and the bombings Bucky can almost remember what it's like to feel safe. Sure, he has to sleep sitting up, or at least on his side, or else he'll wake up seeing Zola's lab instead of his barracks, and maybe he has to fight to suppress a flinch every time someone gives him a friendly pat on the shoulder, but he's in London and everyone speaks English and there are no Nazi doctors cutting him up, so he's counting it as a win.

It's not back to normal, because nothing's ever going to be back to normal with Steve suddenly being taller than him (he's not sore about it, okay, it's just weird and an offense against nature - the muscles he could take, the photographic memory and the fighting skills and the way he can do twelve somersaults in a fucking row, that Bucky could take, but now Steve's _taller_ than him?), but it's almost a new normal, except.

Except that it used to be so _easy_ , even in the trenches, chatting with the other soldiers and having a laugh whenever it looked like there was a laugh to be had because it's a war and you have to take what you can get. And Steve, it used to be the easiest with Steve. Half the time Bucky didn't have to say a damn word to Steve, just raise his eyebrows or give him a look and everything'd be said.

But now Steve's different, even if his face is more or less the same, and Bucky can't remember what that look means, can't tell what Steve's trying to say when he pauses and waits for the words. And Bucky - Bucky's different too, in ways he can't quite find yet, like someone rearranged all his furniture in the dark and he's not going to know what's changed until he bangs his shin on it.

But this is a bar in London, and Steve's waiting for some of the guys who were the most helpful during the march to get well and truly drunk before he asks them to walk with him right back into Hell. Well, that's what Bucky'd be doing, at least - he thinks Steve's just killing time until they stop singing and he can get a word in edgewise. Steve doesn't seem to look at the war and see Hell: he looks at it and sees a bully, and Bucky is well aware of his feelings on bullies.

"I meant to ask," Bucky says, nursing his drink, "Do your clothes still fit? After the - " He gestures in Steve's general direction, and Steve considers the question.

"My hats do," he says. "But they gave me a uniform, so it's not like I have to buy all new ones."

"Huh," says Bucky. "What else'd you outgrow?"

"A lot of bunker ceilings, apparently," Steve says, wry, and Bucky can't hold back a grin. 

"I heard Peggy - Agent Carter - debriefed you?" Steve says, looking at his drink (ginger ale, Bucky heard him order it no matter how much Steve wants to pretend it's watery-ass beer - and some things never change because Steve can't possibly be as much of a lightweight as he used to be, not with the serum, but apparently he still won't drink when he's about to do something that makes him nervous).

"Peggy, huh?" says Bucky. He decided to forego beer entirely and go straight for something that might actually help him sleep tonight, and it glints golden in the low light.

"That's - she - " Steve cuts himself off and sighs. "She's very intelligent and she knows what she's talking about. She's the one who told me that you guys - that the 107th was - " He trails off again. "I'm glad it was her, that debriefed you," he says.

"She seemed nice," Bucky says. "Professional. Wouldn't've known she was a dame except for the lipstick and the hair and the different uniform and her name being Peggy."

Steve gives him one of the few looks that Bucky can still read, the one that's amused and trying not to be. "Did it go all right?"

"Fine," says Bucky, and sips his drink. It suddenly doesn't feel even a little bit strong enough.

"Did they ask - do you know what they did to you?" Steve asks.

"HYDRA wasn't exactly talkative," Bucky says. "At least, not to me."

"But you must've - " Steve says, and then stops himself. Then he starts again, more cautious this time, "Do you feel any different? I just mean, are you - "

"Did _Peggy_ put you up to this?" Bucky demands.

"What? No, I'm - " Steve stops and frowns. "Has she been asking you questions? Outside the debrief?"

"Only nonstop," Bucky says. "Apparently the SSR really, _really_ wants to know if Zola was trying to recreate some kind of serum."

Steve pulls back, too slow to be a flinch. "Peggy thinks they're trying to recreate the serum?"

Bucky shrugs. "Seemed like it, with the questions they were asking me." He looks sideways at Steve. "Was that the…" He uses his free hand, the one he's not keeping glued to his glass, to gesture at Steve. "Erskine? Was that the doctor who did that?"

Steve looks down at the polished wood of the bar. "Yeah." He clears his throat. "If they were trying to do it again, that'd be - pretty bad."

"More Schmidts."

"Yeah, more Schmidts. But he didn't - Doctor Erskine didn't give Schmidt the serum. Schmidt took it."

Bucky frowns. "You know Erskine, then?"

Steve gets a small, sad look in his eye. "I knew him," he says, and that tells Bucky everything he needs to know. It's hard for Bucky to wrap his head around it - that there's someone who came into and out of Steve's life without Bucky so much as meeting him, that there's this whole chapter of Steve's life that Bucky just wasn't there for.

Steve clears his throat and looks up at Bucky. "So were they? Trying to recreate the serum?" he asks.

"How should I know? I don't speak German. They never said 'serum' to me, though." Bucky takes another pull of his drink. It doesn't seem to be doing him much good. He's pretty sure it didn't used to take this much to get him drunk.

Steve takes a deep breath, like he's steeling himself, and says, "What kinds of questions?"

Bucky doesn't want to tell Steve any of it - that on the worst days, the best he could do was fight for his own silence by biting his lip so hard it bled, and that most of the time he was screaming too loud to say anything coherent anyway. That he made himself scream louder and harder because it'd make it harder for him to talk if - when - he broke. But they still got the answers they wanted, by patient repetitions of tests and learning his body language until he couldn't even flinch without giving them what they wanted: data.

He doesn't want any of that anywhere near Steve.

"The usual," says Bucky, and the lie doesn't even burn coming out. "Trying to get intel. Didn't give them anything, though."

"But you're…" says Steve.

"What?"

"You're okay?" Steve says, and he looks so damned worried that Bucky realizes that he can never tell him - Steve believes in the right thing, and if he thinks Bucky might be bringing some part of that factory with him into battle, he'll think the right thing is sending Bucky back stateside.

Well, hell if Bucky's going to leave Steve out on the front lines without him for backup.

So he slides a smile onto his face and says, "I'm here, aren't I?"

Steve frowns, just a tiny bit, like he can tell that there's something Bucky isn't saying. They know each other too well, but on the other hand, it's been a damn long year for both of them.

Bucky thought this'd be easy. Granted, he also thought this particular reunion would be in Brooklyn, but he thought the war would end and he'd come home and there Steve'd be, just like Bucky left him, and it wouldn't matter what Bucky saw or did because Steve would still be in Brooklyn, digging in his heels in back alleys and defying the world to leave a mark this time.

Instead, Steve's here, running headfirst into battle where God only knows what could happen to him, and he's - he's older. There's a determination to him like he knows what it felt like to give in once and he's never, ever doing it again. It's a part of him that Bucky doesn't recognize, and it's got Bucky wrong-footed.

"Well," says Steve, after just a little too long for it to be a comfortable pause, "it's good that you didn't give them anything. Not that - you know nobody'd blame you if you did, though, right?"

"Jesus, Steve, you're not doing so great with getting through sentences today, are you?" Bucky says, before what Steve said catches up with him. He can practically hear himself telling Steve, over and over again from age twelve right up to shipping out, _you know nobody'd blame you if you ran away from a fight just once, right? Instead of getting beat up?_ What he'd meant, every time, was _let me take care of it, you can't just will yourself into being stronger, let me be the brawns and you be the brain_. Only now Steve's got the brawn, too, and he's got the same brains as ever, so what does that leave for Bucky?

Instead he says, "It wasn't that hard not to say anything. They didn't seem to care much about getting intel."

Steve frowns, and Bucky realizes what he's just said.

"They didn't - " Steve begins, and Bucky shakes his head.

"They didn't, at least not the ones that talked to me, but they didn't send in anyone else," Bucky says. "Hell, one of 'em said they were only asking because they had to justify talking to me at all."

Steve looks at his drink and thinks for a long minute. "There's been chatter about HYDRA breaking away from the Nazi establishment entirely," he says. "Just rumors so far."

"Aw, hell," Bucky says, letting his head fall forward into his hand so his palm slaps his forehead, "no it's not. HYDRA was shooting German troops on the battlefield. That's how they got us - they were shooting the Jerries so we thought they were Allied until they were too close. At least when they got us - I don't know about Morita's unit."

Steve rubs his forehead. "This late, everyone'll be out celebrating our triumphant return," he says.

"Guess you'll just have to tell them in the morning, then," Bucky says, and leans over far enough to bump Steve's shoulder with his own. "Still planning on doing your part for the Recruitment Office? Finding some idiots willing to go back there?"

"Recruitment Office has nothing to do with our team," Steve says firmly. "Colonel Phillips agreed to let me put it together myself, and that's exactly what I intend to do."

 _Our_ team, Bucky notices. He's not sure how he feels about it, but Steve gets up and heads towards Dum Dum's table, leaving behind his ginger ale, and Bucky watches at a distance until Steve comes back with that smile that means he got what he wanted.

Steve asks Bucky if he'll come along, as if there's any chance Bucky'll say no. Bucky might've gone to war without Steve, but not by choice - he'd put off enlisting for years by saying that he'd do it after Steve was accepted, and he'd thought that once Roosevelt ended voluntary enlistment Steve would finally give up. He didn't, of course - the recruitment centers stayed open for everyone outside of the draft, and Steve always found ways to get himself in there. At least, he did until Bucky's number came up.

But Steve's sitting here in front of him, asking if he'll follow Captain America into battle, and Bucky's happy enough to be back in a city where he's got an actual toilet and a change of clothes that he's more honest than he means to be, but Steve just smiles.

It doesn't occur to him until the next day, when he's trying to write a letter for his mom and sisters, what he's really doing. He's choosing Steve over them. He could go home, part of him so desperately wants to go home, but then Steve would be out on the battlefield throwing himself at trouble and just daring it to touch him, and there's no way Bucky can let Steve do that alone.

And - and there's a thought that's in the back of his head sometimes, that he can't quite articulate. That he's never going to go home, not really. That the war already chewed him up and spit him out, and if someone with his face and his hands goes back to Brooklyn, well, that's not the same thing, not exactly.

That's the nice thought. The not-so-nice thought is completely, entirely, one-hundred-percent sure that Bucky's going to die before he sees the end of the war. When he tries to think about what he'll do when he gets back, there's just nothing - not even like he can't think of anything to do when it happens, but that the end of the war and him are just things that can't exist at the same time.

He doesn't say it to Steve, or any of the other Commandos. He doesn't dare. He hasn't talked to any of them, not even the ones who'd been in the 107th too, about MacFarlane or Ingrams or Freddy or anyone else who didn't make it out of the factory. He doesn't say that sometimes he still thinks this is all just the effect of the latest concoction of Zola's and that he's drooling himself to death on that table - and he definitely doesn't say that if that's the case then he damn well never wants to wake up.

**4**

Steve takes the room next to Sam's and vaguely wonders, as he eats his chicken tenders and French fries, what this bunker was here for. Finlay had said it was a staging area for HYDRA operations in DC, and that makes sense, given the living quarters. He's not complaining, either - it's nice not to have to find a motel. He doesn't think he could bring himself to leave Bucky's side, under the circumstances. He'd probably end up sleeping in the car, or maybe on a convenient patch of floor.

He wastes a few hours eating and cleaning himself up in the bathroom down the hall. There are no towels, so he doesn't shower, just washes himself as best he can from the sink before deciding he should at least give sleep a token try. The bed's mustier than the hotel and motel beds he and Sam have been sleeping in, but the call had come so late at night – or so early in the morning – that Steve drifts off before he realizes it.

It's not an unfamiliar dream, unfortunately. He's on the Valkyrie, pointing its nose at the ground and feeling his stomach ride up into his lungs as the ship lurches towards the ice, and the blow comes out of nowhere: hard knuckles against the side of his face. He turns and there's Schmidt, skin red and taut, black-leather-clad fist aimed again at Steve's face, and Steve doesn't duck fast enough and Schmidt's on top of him, hitting him over and over again with his left hand.

"No – " Steve says. "Stop – "

And Schmidt does, loosening the fist of his left hand and prying the fingers under the red skin of his neck, peeling it away until it's Bucky who's on top of Steve, the red mask fluttering away like an afterthought.

"Heil HYDRA," Bucky says, and pulls back his fist again – 

And that's when Steve wakes up, same as last time. He doesn't try to go back to sleep. 

He has a book in his bag, but he hasn't really been paying attention to it up to now and that doesn't change much even as he stares at it. He tries to play out how his next talk with Bucky's going to go, tries to see it in his head, but instead he finds himself thinking of Bucky's accusations, of Hill's plans, of the lack of resources and exactly what the potential decisions are going forward. He can't quite bring himself to admit that he already knows the answer and knows what he's going to do.

The door to his room opens, making him jump, and Sam sticks his head in.

"Did you hear me knock?" Sam asks.

"Oh - sorry, I didn't, no," Steve says, putting the book down on the bed next to him.

Sam jerks his chin in the direction of the book. "That any good?"

Steve looks down at it thoughtfully, and admits, "If I could remember a word of it, I'd tell you."

"Fair enough," Sam says easily, closing the door behind him. He crosses his arms and leans against it easily. "You doing okay?"

"And what would 'okay' look like in this context?" Steve asks. 

"Good question," Sam says, inclining his head in concession. "Don't have an answer. You were right about that punch, by the way. You don't even have a bruise."

Steve shifts his legs to the side, planting them on the floor next to the bed, and leans his elbows onto his knees. "He's never gonna trust us now," he says quietly. "And Hill's never gonna trust him."

"Let me guess," Sam says quietly, "you're sitting here also thinking that neither of them are gonna trust _you_."

"He was right, Sam," Steve says. "I let Fury and Hill handcuff him and keep him in here because I - I didn't trust him to be _him_."

"Well, to be fair, then he punched you in the face."

"Oh, that was all Bucky," Steve says. "The Winter Soldier punched a hell of a lot harder."

"I know," Sam says gently. "I saw the stitches."

"There are a hell of a lot of things I don't miss about the war," Steve says contemplatively, "but at least it was simple. You knew who you were fighting, and what you were fighting for."

"So what are you fighting for now?"

"I think - " Steve says, and hesitates. Knowing HYDRA, the rooms are probably bugged, too, and knowing Fury and Hill, they're probably taking advantage of that. Then he decides he doesn't really care anymore. "I think I'm fighting for Bucky. I'm just not entirely sure what that means."

"Think you might know better than you want to admit," Sam says, eyebrows raised. "I gotta say, though, I don't know if _I_ can fight for him. I don't really know him, and he obviously doesn't trust me. At this point, I might be hurting more than I help."

Steve doesn't know what to say with that.

"So you know," says Sam slowly, "I'm pretty beat. It's been a long day, you know? So I think I'm going to go to the shitty-ass bathroom down the hall, and I'm going to take a long, loud shower, then maybe go back to my room and listen to some music or the TV turned up pretty high for a while, and then call it a night pretty early. And you know I'm a sound sleeper. So I guess I'm saying, if you need anything, you're gonna have to let me know real loud and real obvious."

Steve nods, slowly. "I'll make sure to," he says. "You deserve a night off."

"Sometimes we gotta do what we gotta do," Sam says, and offers Steve a hand. Steve hesitates for a second, wondering if it's too obvious, and then decides that he once again doesn't care and stands up to take it anyway.

"Thanks, Sam," he says. "For everything. I don't say it enough."

"You know I'm gonna put that on my resume, right?" says Sam. "'Additional skills: Once personally thanked by Captain America.'"

"Well, if you ever need a character reference, you just let me know," Steve says. "I'd tell 'em you run like an old lady, but I know some elderly women who would be offended at that comparison."

"You should put _that_ on your resume," Sam says. "'Captain America: Kind of an Asshole.'"

"I don't need a resume," Steve says. "That's what I've got a shield for." Then he grimaces. "Had a shield for, I guess."

"It's been lost under a large body of water before, and it turned out okay," Sam says, pushing his weight off the door. "Seriously, though, let me know if you need anything."

Steve nods. "Thanks."

After Sam leaves, Steve takes a moment to get his thoughts in order. Then he leaves his room and heads for the briefing room.

Hill is there, a selection of pistols laid out on the table in front of her and her jacket hanging on the back of one of the briefing room chairs. Steve stops dead in the doorway, and Hill notices him.

"Don't give me that look - they're nonlethal. These are the ICERs," Hill says, checking the balance of one. "Developed by SHIELD and apparently stolen by HYDRA."

"Feels like I've been hearing that a lot lately," Steve says, stepping into the briefing room.

Hill sighs and puts the pistol down. "Look, I get it. You're Captain America. You're the one who punches Hitler in the face and takes down the Nazi bomber and holds off the alien invasion. And I'm glad, I really am. The world would be a lot worse off without you. But, and no offense - you're not enough. You don't make a better world through a bunch of grand gestures without anything to back it up, and SHIELD was that backup. That's what we do - the little stuff that you can't. Not every problem is an alien invasion. SHIELD was dirty, I agree, but there needs to be something to fill the space it left, or nothing's ever going to get done. So quit it with the potshots at SHIELD, will you?"

Steve holds his hands out in front of him. "Point well taken."

Hill looks back at the pistols and says, "I've had to give that speech a lot recently. It might just be a reflex at this point." Steve has a feeling that that's the closest Hill can come to an apology.

"I get it," Steve says. "We're not all testifying in front of Congressional subcommittees."

"You mean _you're_ not," Hill says. "Well, you and Fury."

"Nonlethal, you said?" Steve says, coming closer to the table to look at the pistols.

Hill grabs one and holds it up. "They were developed by some of the techs on one of our field teams, back when SHIELD...existed," Hill says, picking one up again. "The name's better now, at least. They shoot pellets of a sedative that disperses on impact - a dendrotoxin, apparently. Since we're out of subcutaneous delivery devices, I thought this might work."

Steve looks at the display on one wall of the briefing room. Bucky's sitting on his cot, hunched over with his head in his hands, looking for all the world like he's got a hellish hangover.

"Twelve hours, huh?" Steve says, checking his watch. It's been three.

"I guess whatever Zola did to him messed with his metabolism, too," Hill says with a shrug. "It did its job when we needed it to."

"And you think those'll work better?" Steve asks, eyeing the ICERs.

"It's worked on people subjected to other attempts to recreate the supersoldier serum," Hill says.

That's a disturbing thought. "How many of those have there been?"

"You'd be surprised. HYDRA, obviously. Bruce Banner. Project Centipede. The people behind Extremis. The Dyad Institute's whole cloning thing. SHIELD tries - _tried_ to keep tabs on them, with various levels of success."

Steve nods thoughtfully, looking at the ICERs. "Which of those did it work on?"

"Project Centipede," Hill says. "Kind of Extremis on steroids. And on fire. If it was good enough for Centipede, it should be good enough for your friend, there."

"You sure about that?" Steve says.

"Well, I could go in there and test it on him if you insist - "

"No," Steve says, picking one up. He's not familiar with all of the different styles of pistols these days, but these don't look that different from the lethal kind of gun. "How about you try it on me, first?"

Hill looks away from the pistol in her hand to stare at him. "I'm sorry, did you just ask me to shoot you?"

"They're nonlethal, right?" Steve says, shrugging as he puts the pistol down. "Shouldn't be a problem."

Hill's mouth curves into a thin smile. "You don't think it'll work on you."

Steve takes in a deep breath and lets it out, pretending to think about it. "Let's say I'm curious to see if it will. I have to say, most things don't."

"Huh," Hill says. "Captain America has a smug streak. I'll have to tell all my friends."

Steve shrugs again. "If you think you can take me down a notch, go ahead. Put your money where your mouth is. Or your toxin."

Hill narrows her eyes at him, then swings the pistol up and settles into a firing stance, aiming right at Steve's chest. "If you feel yourself going down," she tells him with exaggerated earnestness, "just remember to yell 'timber.' You ready?"

"Still not convinced I have anything to be ready for," Steve goads her, and her finger squeezes the trigger. A puff of dark blue mist explodes across his shirt, and he's hit by a wave of dizziness that's enough to make him stagger a step - but not enough to do anything else.

He braces his hands on his knees for balance and cranes his head up to look at Hill. "Got anything else?" he says, trying not to show in any way that the room is spinning slightly, although less and less by the second.

"God _damn_ ," Hill says appreciatively, letting her trigger hand fall to her side. "Erskine really knew what he was doing, didn't he?"

"I guess he did," Steve says, standing up all the way. It takes some concentration not to sway as he moves to the table, next to Hill, but he makes it there and by the time he does, his head isn't spinning anymore.

"Barnes's enhancements probably aren't anywhere near as good as yours," Hill says, turning her attention back to the table. "This might only give us a few minutes, but it's better than nothing. And," she adds, with a conciliatory glance at Steve, "better than shooting him with an actual bullet."

"That's very thoughtful of you," Steve says dryly. "How long do normal - I mean, how long - "

"Long enough to get the job done," Hill says dismissively.

"And there are no lasting ill-effects?"

"Other than unconsciousness? No. I've heard dry mouth, fatigue, weird blue stuff around the eyes, and monomaniacal desires for world domination are common side-effects, although that might have something to do with the test sample."

Steve nods. His hands are a little sweaty against the sleek surface of the table, but he doesn't feel at all conflicted. "Could I see that?"

Hill hands him the pistol butt-first, without hesitation. "Thinking of replacing the shield?" she says.

"Not really," Steve says, and grimaces. "I'm really sorry, Maria."

And then he shoots her in the chest. He has enhanced reflexes, and she - apparently - trusts him enough to not see it coming; she doesn't even have the chance to try to dodge, just falls to the floor. Blue threads spread outward from her open eyes; apparently that part hadn't been a joke. Steve kneels next to her and checks her pulse, just to be sure, and, with a sigh of relief, finds it.

"Sorry," Steve says again, and starts rifling through her pockets until he finds the keys to the cells and the handcuffs. Then he pulls Hill's jacket down from the chair it's hanging off of and tucks it underneath her head, even though he knows it probably won't matter - it at least makes him feel a little bit better. 

He stands up and tucks the ICER into the back of his jeans. He looks at the display again; Bucky is still sitting on the cot. Steve sighs, looking down at Hill one last time, and then heads for Bucky's cell.

 

**ii**

Bucky's always had good aim, and it's Dum Dum's suggestion to see how he does as a sniper. Part of it's necessity - they could really use someone a little more subtle than Steve in his costume, than Frenchie's penchant for explosives, and Dum Dum's tendency to announce the Commandos' arrival with a loud, whooping _wa-hoo!_ \- and part of it is a reluctance to recruit from outside their escape party from Austria. 

So they go to a makeshift shooting range on the edge of camp, him and Dum Dum and Frenchie (a nickname which Dernier hates so much that Jones won't acknowledge any other name for him anymore) and Morita and Falsworth and Jones go out there, while Steve's stuck in the bunker working out maps with the SSR and getting actual combat training more complicated than "punch them really hard." They get Bucky a rifle with a scope and set him a hundred meters away from a target at first; then two hundred, then four hundred. He hits it each time.

"Told ya," Dum Dum says.

Bucky's got about as much training as any of the other snipers, at least as far as the U.S. goes, but they requisition him the right gun and anything else he might need, and Bucky starts making friends at the range to pick up tips. Some of them are useful ("practice on windy days to get used to it") and some of them aren't ("try not to miss").

"We've seen what some of the German snipers can do," Agent Carter says when she hears, looking Bucky over assessingly. "I certainly won't object to having some of that capability on our side."

They go on their first mission, and Bucky hates it at first, keeping himself back while Steve and the rest of the Howlers dive right in. He hates it right up until he drops three HYDRA guards who are trying to sneak behind Gabe and Frenchie, and they turn around with obvious surprise - so he hates it right up until he realizes that this is absolutely the best way for him to have their backs.

And he's good at it, and he gets better. He never really _likes_ it - it's impersonal and removed in a way that still unsettles Bucky, that he's up on a hill or hidden in the bushes while the rest of the Howlers are up to their necks in danger, but it's useful. _He's_ useful. It's a good, strategic use of resources, and Steve doesn't seem to hold it against him, giving him a grateful salute from the battlefield or a celebratory clap on the shoulder after a mission gone right.

Bucky'll take being useful over being happy any day of the week, especially when it comes to this damn war, but now he knows that deep down, the HYDRA gun wouldn't do it for him: he'd want a baton. 

And he gets the chance sometimes, when they need an advance scout more than they need hidden backup. Bucky's even better at that, at snaking between the illuminated circles of searchlights and cutting a guard's throat without getting so much as a drop of blood on his uniform.

One time, after a particularly messy mission clearing out another HYDRA factory, they're getting ready to move back out to get what intel they could find back to Agent Carter and Colonel Phillips when Bucky sees Steve standing over the makeshift gravesite they'd put together for the HYDRA soldiers that hadn't had the sense to run.

"Worried they're gonna come back up?" Bucky asks, joining him.

"No," Steve says slowly. "I just - sometimes I wish there were another way. Seems senseless, I suppose."

"They were shooting back at us," Bucky reminds him.

"I know." Steve cracks a rueful smile. "I wish they hadn't been doing that, either."

"Well, if it makes you feel better," Bucky says, "just remember that some of them like it, and any one of them would do the same to you if they had half a chance."

"I know that. It's just - it's so easy to see them all as the enemy, just because they're German."

Bucky raises his eyebrows. "'Just'?" he repeats.

"Not everyone in Germany is HYDRA," Steve reminds him. "Or a Nazi, for that matter."

Bucky mulls this over for a moment. "Well," he says, "if you happen to meet one of these magical friendly Germans, lemme know. I'll shake their hand." He walks away before he can see the look on Steve's face, and when Steve rejoins him and the rest of the Commandos to start the march back to friendly territory, they don't talk about it.

They don't talk about a lot of things, actually.

There's a long list of things that Bucky can't bring himself to say, not to anyone, not to any of the Commandos, and sure as hell not to Steve, starting and ending with the fact that he's so steeped in war that he can't remember what it's like not to be a soldier and a killer.

Instead he speaks with his rifle and his pistol and his knife, hoping his message is clear: _I've got your back_.

There are things Steve doesn't talk about, either - whenever his time on tour performing as Captain America comes up he ducks his head, his mouth set in an unhappy line, and changes the subject, and whenever his transformation from skinny Steve Rogers to bulky Cap comes up he gives one-word answers.

Eventually the other Commandos realize that they'll get more fun by bringing up Agent Carter's picture in his compass, which at least makes Steve blush instead of shutting down, and there are some nights that it almost feels like it could be a kind of normal. A friggin' cold, often rainy, too-frequently snowy normal camping out in the ass-middle of enemy territory, or watching Steve run headfirst into danger like he always has, but still normal. It's the missions like that that are the easiest, when Bucky doesn't have to worry about saying the wrong thing or the uncomfortable distance, just watch Steve's six. They mesh better on the battlefield anyway, the same way they moved together in street fights even when they were giving each other the cold shoulder for whatever reason.

And Steve - well, Steve fights HYDRA the same way he fought bullies, which is to say that he still gets his ass kicked sometimes and refuses to stay down. If it weren't for the serum, he'd probably be dead fifty times over, not that that stops him.

It's after one of those ass-kickings that Bucky draws the short straw and gets put on "Captain Bedrest" duty, because the serum may have made Steve heal faster but it didn't make him like being out of commission any more than he had liked it back home, even though it was how he spent a decent chunk of his life before the serum.

This time, Steve caught a bullet to his hip, a messy wound that still has him limping almost four days later.

"Do you know if the serum will keep it from healing wrong, or keep you from having a permanent limp?" Agent Carter demanded of him when they got back to base. "Because Erskine didn't, and I certainly don't. If the medics said bedrest then God help you if I see you on your feet, Captain, do you understand?"

So Steve's stuck in bed, bored out of his skull, and taking it out on Bucky.

"Could you pass me the plans for the train mission?" Steve asks for the fifth time in an hour.

Bucky turns the page of his newspaper (weeks out of date but straight from New York, a grateful gift from Agent Carter to the Commandos as a whole for keeping Steve off his feet), not even bothering to fold it down to look at Steve. "Nope. You're supposed to be sleeping."

"Oh, come on, I'm fine," Steve says. "I can still read, reading's allowed on bedrest - "

"You only slept for two hours last night, and don't try to deny it, Dum Dum told me when I relieved him." Now Bucky does fold down the paper. "He thinks you're a whiny punk, by the way. His words, not mine. 'Never knew Captain America was such a whiny - '"

"He did not."

"He was thinking it, at least," Bucky says. He's been a master at hiding his smiles at Steve's irritation his entire life, and now is no different - a lot may have changed, but Steve still takes Bucky's bait and riles him right back, giving as good as he gets.

But this time Steve doesn't say anything, just looks over at the tent wall. His jaw is tense, his lips pressed together, and Bucky lets his eyes trace down to Steve's hands - they're in tight fists, at least until Steve sees Bucky looking and relaxes them.

"Do you want me to get the medic?" Bucky says quietly. "Maybe try the morphine again - "

"It's not going to work," Steve says, and sighs. "It's fine. It's just a little stiff. Maybe if I could walk around for a while, stretch it - "

"Nice try, but there's not a chance in Hell," Bucky informs him.

Steve opens his mouth and then thinks better of it, turning whatever was on the tip of his tongue into a loud open-mouthed sigh. Bucky readjusts his grip on the newspaper - it's crumpling a bit where he's holding it, and he carefully relaxes his fingers. This isn't the first time Steve's done that, and Bucky just wishes he'd say whatever he's about to say. The not-joking is worse. Bucky could probably get through just about anything, if Steve would just give him shit about it.

"I gotta hit the latrine," Steve says, and Bucky folds the paper up.

"All right, then, come on," he says, holding out his arms to help Steve up.

"For God's sake, Buck, at least let me - "

"Nope," Bucky says, and hauls Steve up. Steve, for all his protests, leans heavily on him as they head out to the latrine. Bucky tries not to worry about that, and what Agent Carter said. His number one rule of following Captain America into battle is to never let Steve see him scared, which was basically also his number one rule of following Steve back in Brooklyn, so at least he's got a lot of practice.

"Were you _aiming_ for my boots?" Bucky grumbles on the way back.

"'Course not," Steve says, too smooth to be anything other than a deliberate attempt to get Bucky's back up. "Just a happy coincidence."

"Punk," Bucky says. "I liked you better when you had scarlet fever."

"I was basically unconscious the whole time," Steve says.

"Exactly. So much less mouth on you."

Steve huffs out a laugh, but it's strained, and he lays back down on the pallet in the medical tent without complaint. Bucky opens the newspaper again and sits himself back in his chair. There are a few minutes of blessed, beautiful silence.

At least until Steve says, too innocent, "Could you pass me the file on the train mission?"

"Sure, just as soon as I'm done shining your piss off my boots," Bucky says, not bothering to move the newspaper. Steve is damn lucky that the Commandos have a bet going on who'll be the one to snap in the face of a convalescent Captain America, and Bucky doesn't want to lose.

"Buck, you know how important this mission is," Steve says, in the exact tone of voice that Bucky remembers from their childhood, directed first at Steve's mother and then later at Bucky himself - the 'if you could just help me down the stairs I'm sure I can make it to my art class even though I'm coughing my insides out' voice, also known as the 'you know this is a bad idea and I know you're going to say no, but I'm going to try anyway' voice: half pleading, half resigned, and all frustrated.

"Sure I do," Bucky says. "If we find Zola on the train like the intel says, I can finally give him that bullet to the back of the head I owe him."

"Colonel Phillips wants him alive," Steve reminds him, although he doesn't sound too wedded to the idea either.

"Think I could convince Colonel Phillips to let me shoot him in the foot, then?" Bucky says.

"Well, I don't usually approve of pointless violence - "

"Oh, it'll be plenty pointed - "

" - but I'd be happy to ask the Colonel for you if you'd, I don't know," and Steve makes a show of considering, "hand me the mission file?"

"Absolutely," Bucky says. "Just as soon as you can take yourself to the latrines without needing help."

Steve huffs out an exaggerated sigh. "Fine. Could you at least pass me my sketchbook, then?"

Bucky puts down the newspaper and grabs the sketchbook and the stub of a pencil that's left off one of the nearby tables.

"If you draw a train, Steve, I swear to God - "

Steve gives Bucky a wry look as he takes the sketchbook and says, in a damn near perfect impression of his mother (God rest her soul), "Don't take the Lord's name in vain, James."

"That wasn't in vain, it was a genuine plea," Bucky says, sitting back in his chair and putting his hands together for prayer. "Dear Lord, please give me the patience not to wallop my friend Steve here while he's already in such dire straits. And while I got your attention, Lord, please let me not offend his delicate sensibilities, which have been so tested this year by finding out that even HYDRA guards shit themselves when they die, and by that one HYDRA guard that was on the crapper when we raided and croaked with a gun in his hand and his pants round his ankles."

"Bucky," Steve protests, even as he's laughing - he might've been a good Catholic for his mother, but he's been a soldier long enough to have a certain sense of humor, even if he had been hilariously surprised at the first revelation Bucky mentioned.

"Although, Lord, I don't know where those sensibilities were when he was _pissing on my boots_ \- "

He's interrupted by a pillow to the face, thrown so gently the impact barely registers.

"Isn't that an abuse of your God-given patriotic supersoldier powers?" Bucky wonders, fluffing the pillow before tossing it back at Steve, who of course catches it and tucks it back behind his head, the bastard.

"Oh, if I was abusing my God-given patriotic supersoldier powers, you'd know," says Steve, and opens up the sketchbook.

"Hey, do one of Falsworth and that bird that tried to nest in his beret," Bucky says, leaning forward to watch Steve draw, and he manages to keep Steve's mind off the damn train mission for a good couple hours. He almost feels a little bad about it later - he can't shake the feeling sometimes that he's stealing time from Captain America and giving it to Steve when he pulls stuff like this, but the train mission won't be for another week if their intel's right, and Steve deserves a break.

The caricature that Steve draws of Bucky has him throttling a HYDRA guard in each hand, and it isn't until later that Bucky notices that Steve put a tiny little train in the mountain background, the son of a bitch.

**3**

Steve hadn't been the one to unlock Bucky's cell before, so it takes him a couple of tries to find the right key, but eventually the door swings open and Bucky looks up from the cot.

"Steve," he says, sitting up a bit straighter. "What - "

"Want to go for a walk?" Steve says. "Or a drive, I guess. Or - I'm basically busting you out. I don't have a snappy joke for it. Sorry."

Bucky stares at him. "You - what?"

"I'm busting you out," Steve repeats. "Of course, part of that is you actually coming with me, which means getting up or moving or doing...anything at all, really, other than just sitting there."

Bucky keeps staring. "I thought - " he says. "I thought you said you trusted these guys."

"I do," Steve says. "But you don't, so that's that." After a moment he adds, "And Hill definitely doesn't trust you, so there's also that." Then he winces. "She probably won't like you more after this, either."

"Where is she, locked in a closet somewhere?" Bucky says, standing up warily.

Steve winces again, harder. "Unconscious on the floor, actually. She'll probably be angrier at me for that than you, though." And Steve has no doubt that she will be angry - very, very angry. And Fury - 

Well. This isn't the first time Steve's thrown caution, orders, and good sense to the wind for Bucky, and he highly doubts it will be the last, either. He wouldn't turn back now even if he could.

"You coming or not?" Steve says.

Bucky doesn't come any closer. "And where's the other one, what's his name - "

"Sam," Steve says. "He's staying out of our way."

"So he knows you're breaking me out," Bucky says, his expression hard. "He's just letting you do it."

"Yeah," Steve says. "You - you think this is a trick, too?"

There's that smile again, the bitter, tight curl of Bucky's lips as he looks away. "I think you have no idea what HYDRA would do just because they can. And I know you think they couldn't pull one over on you because you're Captain America and all - "

"That's not it," Steve protests.

"Really?" Bucky says. "Because you've been telling me that HYDRA's been messing with my head, but every time I try to say that maybe they're messing with yours, you tell me how impossible that is."

Steve can't think of anything to say, because Bucky's right. Not for the reasons he thinks, but he's still right. And Steve can damn near feel himself being torn in two because he can't leave Bucky here, but if he goes like this - if Bucky doesn't trust him - then for Bucky it's really just trading one perceived cage for another.

"Okay," Steve says hoarsely, and pulls his car keys out of one pocket and his wallet out of another. He tosses them both at Bucky's feet. "The car's the green one. The transmission's an automatic, so you don't have to worry about shifting gears - just put it in drive and it'll do it for you. The highway's at the end of the dirt road leading here, and there's a map in the glove compartment that'll get you to the interstates. Those are new," he adds. "I've got a couple hundred dollars cash, but it's not as much as it sounds like. If you need more, use the cards. The gray one you just sign my name for; the blue one needs my PIN code, which is 5-8-45."

Bucky stares at him, still not moving.

"Oh, and you might need this," Steve adds, pulling the ICER out of his waistband. He sets it on the floor, the butt pointing at Bucky, and kicks it over towards the keys and the wallet. "It's not a real gun - not bullets, but this, this toxin thing that just knocks people out. If HYDRA's looking for you - "

"What the hell are you doing?" Bucky demands finally.

"I don't think they could've put trackers in any of that, although there might be one in the car, so you might want to get another one - they still hotwire the same," Steve says. "If you think that they're HYDRA and that they're following me or using me somehow, then go without me."

"I - " Bucky says, and Steve can see in his eyes that he's considering it.

"Just - send me a letter or something? Every now and then? Just so I know you're okay. My address is on my driver's license. Well - I'll get any mail that you send there, anyway."

Bucky bends down and picks up the keys, wallet, and ICER in slow, reluctant motions. "You don't - " he says. "You're just gonna send me out there?"

"I'm not gonna let you stay a prisoner," Steve says. "And if the only way for that to happen is for you to go alone, then I guess - " He has to stop, his throat suddenly tight. "Then I guess this is how it has to be."

At least Bucky's eyes are bright, too. It occurs to Steve that the first thing the two of them have really done together in seventy years is be torn up by this.

"Do you - " Bucky says, and then goes momentarily silent. His mouth twitches in a sudden, unhappy motion, and he starts again, moving the ICER slightly in his hand. "Do you need me to make it look good?"

"Nah," Steve says. "It doesn't work on me. I tested it. Probably wouldn't work on you, either, for that matter."

"I could," says Bucky, and clears his throat. "I could knock you out."

"Maybe you could give it a shot," Steve says. "But I don't think it would work. You - you already tried once before."

Bucky gives the far wall a furious look. "Or HYDRA made you think that."

"That would be nice," says Steve quietly, and Bucky looks back at him. It's the same look - the fear, the disbelief, the horror and the pain - that Steve saw on the Helicarrier, in the moments before the floor gave way.

Then Bucky blinks, looking away again with a deep breath, and says, "Come on, then. I can't leave your stupid ass behind. You'd probably turn yourself in the second I hit the highway."

"I - " says Steve. "Yeah, okay, I probably would."

"Here." Bucky steps forward and shoves the keys, wallet, and ICER back into Steve's hands. "I wouldn't be able to drive one of those stupid new cars anyway," he says. "Do they at least fly? Pretty sure they should fly by now."

"No," says Steve, lightheaded with happiness, "it's a rental."

Steve doesn't add that it's a rental because his motorcycle was impounded after being deserted in a hospital parking lot and Sam's car suffered from some slight mechanical issues courtesy of Bucky himself. It doesn't really matter now, anyway.

"You know the way out?" Bucky asks as Steve quickly puts everything back in pockets.

"We're about six floors down," Steve says, and starts down the hallway, Bucky half a step behind him. "Bunker was built underground. There are only stairs, as far as I know, though I guess they must've gotten all this equipment in here somehow." He slams the door to the stairwell open and starts taking the steps two at a time to get out, before he realizes that Bucky isn't with him - he's still standing at the landing, staring at the walls like they're a puzzle he's trying to figure out. "Bucky?"

"I - " Bucky says, looking around. "I've been in here before."

"Hill probably brought you this way," Steve says, but Bucky's already shaking his head.

"She brought me down the other ones, on the other side of the hall, but they were different - the paint was different, and the lights…" He carefully places one hand on one of the railings, running his fingers over the peeling black paint. "But I've been in this one before."

Steve takes a few steps down, telegraphing the motion so he doesn't startle Bucky. "When?"

Bucky gives no indication that he can even hear Steve, just stares at the railing and says, almost dreamily, "They took something from me. I wanted it back…" He blinks, and then turns, his eyes focusing on Steve. His voice is stronger when he says, "I was going down. Further down than this."

It must've been when he was the Winter Soldier, Steve realizes. When he brought Finlay and demanded his memories back.

"Do...do you want to go down instead?" Steve says, trying his best to keep his tone even. If this is what does it - if this makes him lose Bucky to the Winter Soldier again - 

"If HYDRA took something from me," Bucky says, firm and half-vicious, "then I want it _back_."

He starts down the stairs, and this time Steve follows him.

Bucky goes all the way to the bottommost floor and charges through the door there, and Steve has to pick up his pace to keep up with him as he almost jogs down the hallway.

"Bucky - "

"It's here," Bucky says, "there's something here - "

He pushes open the door at the end of the hallway, revealing a wide room filled with computer equipment.

In the middle of the room, an ugly black figure in the stark light, is the chair.

**i**

He doesn't remember the impact, but he remembers the desperate, breathless moments leading up to it, when he screamed as if it'd do a damn thing and reached as if there was any chance that if he just tried a little bit harder he might be able to get Steve's hand. He doesn't remember the cold, not as a feeling; not past the mountain of pain and the trail of red dripped on white.

What he does remember is flashes of his flesh tearing, each tooth of the saw digging further into his skin and the cracking sound of bone before waking up in a lopsided world, on a bed that's too close to being that table and surrounded by doctors in white lab coats with the HYDRA insignia on the lapels.

It's not easy - the world shudders and lurches from whatever they've given him and his left arm isn't cooperating, but he manages to get one of them in the neck hard enough that he can feel the collapse of his airway even as he's tumbling off the bed and he tries to break his fall but his left arm still won't do what he wants it to - 

He stumbles up, or as close to upright as he can, but even though everything's tilting and distorted he can tell there's something wrong, his balance is off and when he looks for his left arm it's not there, it's just not there, rust-red old-blood-tinged bandages across a stump and he can't stop staring at it - 

One of the other doctors gets behind him and there's a pinch in his neck. Everything goes dark.

The next time, though, he wakes up to a familiar cold lingering on the surface of his skin. He's on his back, and when he looks down at himself, he's not in a bed. He's back on a table. The restraints are uneven across him, cutting through where his left arm should be.

"Sergeant Barnes," says a familiar voice, and past the haze he manages to focus on Zola, but it's wrong, his face is wrong, there are more lines than there should be. "We would not have had to restrain you," Zola continues, this time with an edge of recrimination to his voice, "but the last time you were awake, you killed an innocent technician who was only trying to save your life."

Bucky says nothing. Maybe this is a dream - a goddamned nightmare and he'll wake up in a tent with Steve snoring like a freight train next to him, that's happened before - 

"Of course," Zola says, "that was some time ago. We were not quite ready for you yet, as it happened. There was much to prepare." He smiles a little. Bucky has never seen a less pleasant smile. "I should thank you, Sergeant. Without your contributions during the war, the cryostasis procedure would not exist. We were not sure if it would last for nine years, but your results are quite promising."

 _Nine years_. He's lying. He has to be lying, to mess with Bucky's head - 

"For all that Schmidt spoke about fate, I never quite believed it," Zola says. "At least, not until I was told that you were Captain America's close personal friend. Perhaps Schmidt was not entirely incorrect, although it will not be his future that HYDRA brings to fruition. And if you are wondering if the Captain will save you again, I must tell you that he has been dead for as long as you have been frozen." He smiles again, and this time it has an edge, like one of his scalpels - except he never used the scalpel just to cause pain, only for practical purposes, and this smile is the opposite. "He may have succeeded in killing Schmidt and destroying the Valkyrie, for all that it was Schmidt's pride and joy, but HYDRA is more than a single man. Cut off one head, and two more shall take its place. I am but one head, and you - you are one, as well. Or you will be." 

"Go to hell," Bucky says, and his voice is rough and creaking.

"The procedure has already begun. You are to be the new fist of HYDRA," Zola says, ignoring Bucky's interjection. He puts a finger, very carefully, on Bucky's shoulder, which Bucky can't even feel. "We will make you better. We will bring you perfect order."

A voice - someone standing outside Bucky's field of view - says, "Is this really necessary, Doctor Zola?"

The voice, Bucky realizes with cold panic, has an American accent.

"It is no matter," Zola says. "He will not remember. We will make him forget."

Zola reaches above Bucky's head and pulls down some kind of headpiece, two paddles against the sides of Bucky's head.

"You, Sergeant," Zola says, "will shape the future."

Then he flips a switch, and there's only blunt, blank pain.

**2**

Bucky stays frozen in the doorway for a long time, staring at the chair. Steve almost puts his hand on Bucky's shoulder to get his attention, but thinks better of it - Bucky's tense, his shoulders drawn in and his breaths tight and shaky, even though Steve can't see his face.

Steve comes up beside him instead, slowly enough to telegraph his movements. "Bucky?" he says quietly.

"Do - " Bucky says, and Steve is close enough to him to see that he's not taking his eyes off the chair. "Do you know what that is?"

After a moment, Steve says, "Yes. It's what HYDRA used to wipe your memories."

Bucky keeps staring at it.

"Do you remember it?" Steve says quietly.

Bucky shakes his head, a jerky, swift motion. "No. I - maybe. I don't - I don't even know." He gives an uneven, bitter laugh. "How fucked up is that? I'm looking at the damn thing and I can't even tell if I remember it or not."

Steve doesn't know what to say.

Bucky says, in a voice smaller than Steve thought he could ever have, "It scares the shit out of me."

After a moment, Steve says, "It scares the shit out of me, too."

Bucky takes a shuddering breath, in and out. "It's true, isn't it? All that stuff about - about what I did. What they made me do."

Steve swallows past the lump in his throat, and manages a quiet, "Yeah."

"I can't - " Bucky says. "I can't remember it. There's just - I've been here before, and I wanted...I wanted to forget. To remember. I don't…" He licks his lips, frowning as though it hurts him. "All those people...and I shot you?" It comes out as much like a plea as a question.

"It wasn't your fault," Steve says hollowly. Bucky turns to look at him, and Steve says, "I missed the hell outta you, Buck."

Bucky gives him a look that's half-frown and half-wince, like he doesn't know what to do with it, but Steve keeps going because he can't not.

"I'm sorry," he says. "I'm sorry I let you fall. I'm sorry I dragged you onto that train in the first place. I'm sorry I didn't come after you when they pulled me out of the ice. I'm sorry I was on some USO stage while you were in a HYDRA cell. I'm sorry I didn't write when you shipped out, just because I was stupid and jealous." He swallows, hard, and says, "I'm sorry I have no idea what to do."

Bucky just stares at him, but from the look on his face you'd think someone was breaking one of his fingers. "Jesus, Steve," he says finally, "anything else you're sorry about? Maybe one more for good measure?"

"Don't - " Steve says.

"Was the fall of Rome your fault, too?"

"I thought you were dead," Steve says, his voice flat. "I thought you were dead and that I'd never get to tell you that - that you're my best friend. That when everybody else sees Captain America, it's damn hard to remember that Steve Rogers is in there, too. And as much as I hate the circumstances, _Jesus_ , Buck, you have no idea how happy I am that you're alive, and I'm sorry I'm not sorry about that."

Bucky's silent for a long minute. "Everything's just gone FUBAR, hasn't it," he says quietly. 

Steve can't muster a laugh. "I guess so." He clears his throat. "So if you want to leave, I'll help break you out myself. If you want to stay, I'll even shine your shoes. Just - " His throat closes before he can finish - _don't leave again_. On his second try, he manages, "I don't know how to help."

"Not exactly a Nazi you can punch in the face, huh," says Bucky.

"Those were the good old days," says Steve, but it sounds like a lie even to him. The good old days were in Brooklyn, strolling in the valleys carved by skyscrapers and talking about everything and nothing all at once. He looks at Bucky, and he can tell Bucky's thinking the same thing - at least until he starts frowning.

"Did you say you _let me_ fall?" Bucky says. "From a train going at the goddamn speed of light while I was hanging onto the side and you and your ego blame yourself for - "

"It was my fault that - " Steve says, and then stops cold. "You - you remember it?"

Bucky blinks, looks down at the floor. "I," he says. "Yeah. Yeah, and - and some of what came after. When Zola found me again."

Steve thinks back to what Finlay had said - that Bucky's memories were restored up to the first time his brain was mapped. Steve hadn't considered that he might have been awake before that, after he fell - that he might remember some of what Zola had done to him -

"Not a lot," Bucky adds. "But - there was an American with him. I guess Zola must've started HYDRA already by then. He said - he said he was going to make me forget. Make me the new fist of HYDRA." His mouth twists unhappily. "I guess he did."

"I should've killed Zola when I had the chance," Steve says before he can stop himself.

Bucky just nods, empathizing without agreeing. "Is he at least dead now?"

"Twice over, kind of," Steve says. "The first time of cancer, and the second when the computer that he uploaded his brain to was bombed when SHIELD was trying to kill me and Natasha."

"God. The future's so friggin' weird," Bucky says.

"Yeah," Steve says tiredly, but rallies just to see if he can get a smile out of Bucky, halfhearted though it may be. "The aliens weren't even little green men."

"I, uh," says Bucky. "I didn't - " He looks back towards the chair, and his mouth resettles in determination. "I lost a couple days. When Zola had me. I put marks on my cell wall, when they didn't have me - and a couple times, there were more marks than I remembered putting there."

Steve fights the urge to take a deep breath. "Why didn't you tell anyone?"

Bucky laughs, a bitter exhale. "What, and get shipped back to the States? Handed over to SSR so they could do exactly what Zola did trying to figure me out? Let you keep running around Europe, liberating HYDRA camps with nobody to have your back?"

"The Commandos had my back," says Steve automatically. "And Peggy, and Howard - "

"Yeah, I get the point," Bucky says, his eyes shuttered and closed again. Steve knows immediately he's said the wrong thing. "I'm not some dainty, fragile dame, Steve. I can take care of myself."

"Sounds a lot like what I told you after my mom's funeral," Steve says. "You didn't buy it then, either."

"Maybe I was wrong," Bucky says. "Maybe you never needed me after all."

Steve's so taken aback that he doesn't know how to say it - how to tell Bucky that almost everyone else he's got now knew Captain America first and Steve Rogers second, and no matter how much they know Steve now, they're coming from such a different starting point in discovering Steve Rogers that he's not entirely convinced they can end up at the same place. Bucky saw him at his lowest - at his sullen melancholy over the string of 4F's, at his petty jealousy that wouldn't even let him celebrate with his best friend the night before he shipped out, at his sunken-eyed, inarticulate grief after first his father's and then his mother's funeral. The rest of the world has to learn that Captain America can be a man, too; Bucky sees the man first.

So instead he says, "If you think that, then you're an idiot."

Bucky doesn't say anything for a while. Then he says, "You'd really break me outta here? Even though I nearly killed you?"

Steve bites back his kneejerk denial, and instead says, "Say the word and we're gone."

"Why?"

"Because you're my friend," Steve says simply, "and I want you to be happy."

Bucky does laugh at that. "Good friggin' luck with that one."

"I'll settle for 'okay,'" Steve concedes. 

Bucky nods, looking down at the floor; licks his lips and bites them together. Then he says, "You ever notice how saying something makes it feel more real?"

Steve doesn't answer. He just waits for what he knows is coming, and tries to brace himself.

"I think - " says Bucky, and shakes his head again, his mouth twisted in a grimace. "I think I gotta get back in that chair again. I think I have to remember."

Steve takes a deep, harsh breath against the tightness in his throat. "Okay," he says.

"I just - I can't let Zola take that, too," Bucky says. "I have to _know_."

"Okay," says Steve.

Bucky looks over at him. "For all I know, I might try to kill you again."

"Okay."

"You're just taking this pretty well, is all," Bucky says. "Given that I might just - change completely."

"If it were me," says Steve, "what would you do?"

Bucky looks at him steadily, and says, "When it was you, I followed you anyway."

"I - " Steve says. "I wasn't all that different. I mean sure, I got taller, but - "

"It was a whole year, Steve, of course you were different," Bucky says. "And - and so was I. I just didn't want to be. And I didn't want you to be, either."

Steve doesn't want to admit it's true, and that he felt exactly the same way back. He wants to say it doesn't matter, but that's not strictly true. It mattered a whole hell of a lot then, and it matters a whole hell of a lot now. But that doesn't mean it changes anything.

"You're still my friend," he says. "That's not different."

Bucky says, quietly, "No, it's not."

"And it's not going to change no matter who comes out of that chair," Steve says.

Bucky looks down. "To think," he says eventually, "it just took us seventy years and dying to fucking talk to each other."

Steve finds himself smiling faintly at that. "Welcome to the Fucked-Up Veterans Club," he says. "The benefits are terrible, but the company's not half-bad."

It's worth it for the smile that Bucky gives him back - small and half-broken but honest, and everything feels more okay than it has in a damn long time.

**1**

"I still don't know how you got me to agree to this," Hill mutters, typing into the computer in the basement.

"Well, your exact words were 'Hell if Fury's going to make me the Winter Soldier's babysitter for the rest of my life,' so," Steve says.

Hill ignores him and continues. "Especially after you literally shot me in the back."

"In my defense, I shot you in the front, and it was nonlethal," Steve points out.

"Yeah, that's really not better," Hill says, standing all the way up. "If what Finlay told us is right, that should be it. What's taking Wilson so long? Any chance your friend made a run for it?"

"No," Steve says immediately. "He wouldn't."

"Your faith in him is touching," Hill drawls, just as the door to the basement room opens again and Sam and Bucky walk in. Sam looks, as always, at ease, with his hands in his jeans pockets, and although Bucky's shoulders are tightly pulled in, his jaw is set in familiar stubborn determination.

Steve comes over to them, letting Hill continue supervising Finlay. "Everything okay?"

"Sergeant Barnes here was just telling me how you gave him the keys to my rental car and told him to dump it to steal another one," Sam says, eyebrows raised. "You're such a great friend, man."

Steve looks at Bucky, who despite his tension is trying not to smile in that way that means he's deliberately getting Steve's goose, and Bucky shrugs unrepentantly. 

"Yeah, well," Steve says, "I figured once you got Bucky's pension and backpay worked out you could probably use it to buy yourself a new car."

"That's so illegal it's not even funny," Sam says, shaking his head. "All that shit about the conferences doesn't even come close to touching that, don't even joke."

"It's ready," Hill calls, and Sam looks from Steve to Bucky and back.

"I'll give you guys a minute," he says, and goes over to join Hill.

Bucky takes a deep breath, and then another.

"You okay?" Steve says.

"No," Bucky says, "but I gotta do this. I'm not letting Zola get that, too."

"I'll be here when you wake up," Steve says.

"Might not be me who wakes up," Bucky says, and although his face is carefully blank, his right hand is trembling slightly.

"I'll be here no matter who wakes up," Steve says.

After a moment, Bucky says, "And if I try to kill you again?"

Steve leans over a bit to bump Bucky's shoulder with his own, slow enough for Bucky to pull away if he wants to. "Apparently seventy years made you a terrible marksman. You shot me four times and I still didn't die. It's embarrassing, really."

Bucky laughs at that - just a few surprised, quiet chuckles, but he holds his shoulders a bit more square and his mouth is tugged less into a frown. "Promise me you'll never stop being such a son of a bitch."

"I couldn't even if I tried," Steve says.

Bucky nods, and keeps nodding until he steps forward. Steve follows him, taking up his position on the right side of the chair as Bucky eases himself into it, leaning forward instead of back.

"Is there - " Bucky says, and then clears his throat. "There should be a mouth guard…?"

"Here." Hill comes forward, holding it. "We took it off you when we found you."

Bucky takes it as Sam says, "We sure that's clean?"

"I soaked it in mouthwash," Hill says, giving Sam a look. "I do have _some_ standards."

"On the footage we saw, it looked like it hurt," Steve tells Bucky.

"I know."

"A lot."

"I know."

"Okay. Just - wanted to make sure you knew what you were getting yourself into."

Bucky's mouth curves into a tight smile that doesn't come far enough in from the corners. "Where's the fun in that?"

Steve forcibly relaxes his hands, and puts one on Bucky's arm, against his wrist. Bucky clumsily puts his left hand on top of Steve's, then gently pushes Steve's hand off so he can take the mouthguard with his right hand. 

He looks up at Steve, just for a moment, and Steve says, "With you 'til the end of the line."

Bucky nods, steeling himself, and repeats, "End of the line." Then he puts the mouthguard in and takes a few deep breaths, before nodding sharply to Hill and lying back in the chair.

Steve gives Bucky's shoulder a reassuring squeeze, and Bucky gives him a quick thumbs-up in return as Steve steps backwards. Automated restraints crawl across Bucky's arms, and though Steve can watch the tremors passing through Bucky's body before the top part of the apparatus has come down, Bucky's face stays placid but determined as the apparatus lowers to cup his face.

He closes his eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> Detailed warnings: graphic depictions of torture, violence, murder, captivity, illness, nonconsensual medical experimentation and drug use, and injury; scatological, blasphemous, and gallows humor befitting of soldiers; multiple minor character death, both original and canonical; gibberish neuroscience (apologies to anyone who actually knows anything about memory formation in the brain!)
> 
> This fic take elements of the comics' Winter Soldier plotline that may not mesh 100% with what was on-screen - namely, it assumes that Bucky was found in 1945, woke up, killed several orderlies, put into cryofreeze until 1954, and _then_ got the arm. And then killed more orderlies. Zola may be a genius, but I find it a bit hard to swallow that he just happened to have a metal arm lying around, or that they could make a metal arm in 1945, so instead Zola spent nine years on dedicated technological development and testing or something, which totally makes a cybernetic arm plausible.
> 
> Usually I try to say what the crack title for the fic would've been, but in this case I...actually used the crack title. It's from "Thank Goodness" from Wicked, because apparently good-hearted blondes in pain over getting what they thought they wanted is a universal draw.
> 
> Feel free to come say hi on [tumblr](http://starsandatoms.tumblr.com)! There is also now a [brief follow-up](http://starsandatoms.tumblr.com/post/97258435023/follow-up-to-happy-is-what-happens-when-your-dreams) on tumblr as well!


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